If there's one thing the
documentary world could do without, it's another liberal urbanite throwing on
flannels, adopting a folksy tone, and embarking on a gimmicky first-person
stunt as a way to illuminate an important issue. King Corn offers two of them: Curt
Ellis and Ian Cheney, Boston-based college buddies who return to their
ancestral home of Greene, Iowa, and spend a year planting and harvesting an
acre of corn. Their affable little project represents the spoonful of sugar
that makes the corn-industry-factoid medicine go down, as Ellis and Cheney
learn about subsidies and surpluses, and the insidious nutritional aspects of
an industry that's growing in proportion to America's bellies. And yet King
Corn,
produced and directed by Aaron Woolf, isn't as officious as it sounds, because
Ellis and Cheney are low-key tour guides with a minimum of snark, and the
one-acre-farm gimmick doesn't carry too heavy a load.
After providing a helpful
tutorial on American corn production past and present, Ellis and Cheney head
off to Greene, a farming town of just over a thousand people, to play their
miniscule part in the burgeoning corn industry. They learn how government
subsidies work, how ammonia fertilizer increases the yield by fivefold over
what farmers of earlier generations might have expected, and how the system
favors mass production over small family farms. They also get into the ubiquity
of corn in everything we consume, from corn-fed beef to the high-fructose syrup
that sweetens sodas and other products, all contributing to the rise of obesity
and Type 2 diabetes. Lest it nibble off more than it can chew, King Corn doesn't get into how the
ethanol explosion has transformed an already-burgeoning industry, but its focus
on nutrition keeps its argument tight and convincing. Best of all, it doesn't
irritate, which puts it a notch above the current invasion of Michael
Moore-inspired yahoos.
Key features: Seventeen minutes of
deleted scenes presumably (and wisely) cut for being either too wacky or too
dry, a fake instructional video about agriculture called "The Lost Basement
Lectures," and the worst environmentally friendly packaging since Sting's The
Soul Cages.