THE STORY – A profile of the activist group Climate Defiance, an environmental movement that utilizes nonviolent, direct-action protests to bring attention to the damage being done to the environment and to demand government action to enact new legislation to stop the polluters and bring those companies to justice.
THE CAST – Michael Greenberg, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, Jamal Bowman, Summer Lee, Zohran Mamdani
THE TEAM – Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall (Directors)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
It’s certainly a grabber of an opening. In the ballroom of a staid New England country club, a group of young people bursts through the doors, disrupting an event honoring Brian Moynahan, the CEO of Bank of America, which the protesters claim is one of the nation’s top 5 funders of fossil fuels. As Moyhahan is being hustled away, security guards swoop in to tear up the activists’ signs and manhandle them out of the room, ordering them to leave the premises. As the demonstrators regroup, they critique their own performance and consider this intervention a success.
These are the members of Climate Defiance, an organization that uses direct-action protests to draw attention to environmental damage and to demand government action to enact new legislation to stop polluters and bring those companies responsible to justice. Their struggle to bring a bright light to this ongoing crisis is the focus of Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall’s new doc, which offers a fly-on-the-wall look at the mechanics of forming an activist group, working together, and keeping it from coming apart at the seams.
Climate Defiance was co-founded by Michael Greenberg, who is the group’s spokesman and is responsible for its day-to-day management. Having watched polite protests in the past garner a limited government response to environmental issues, Greenberg decides to go another route. Inspired by the success of such past confrontational organizations as ACT UP in the 1980s, he uses effective direct-action tactics to publicly confront, face-to-face, the CEOs and politicians whose money and votes have supported the companies responsible for environmental destruction. Greenberg, however, uses his media savvy to bring these tactics up to date, with iPhones at the ready to record every incident, which he then turns into Instagram & TikTok postings that have garnered millions of views. That phenomenal success has, in turn, led to interest from traditional media, whether in print (in newspapers such as The Guardian) or on networks such as CBS (at that time, at least).
The film successfully captures Climate Defiance’s two-pronged approach to its goals: garnering widespread news attention for its public shaming of business CEOs and recalcitrant politicians opposed to its cause, while persuading open-minded politicos to get off the bench and into the fight. That cause is supported by Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Summer Lee (D-PA), as well as ex-Rep. Jamal Bowman (D-NY) and NYC Assemblyman (and now Mayor) Zohran Mamdani, who publicly back the group’s efforts.
Hershey and Wall have structured their film with Greenberg at its center, and while a few of the team members are individualized, the filmmakers instead skillfully capture the team as a whole, especially in the moments before and after an on-camera ambush. It’s the exhilarating mixture of anticipation and nervousness that the team members share that makes their actions, as progressive as they are, much more relatable to an audience.
The filmmakers aren’t nearly as effective, though, at capturing the enigma that is Greenberg, even though we spend the majority of the film’s runtime with him. Certain parts of his background are easy to understand. He embraces his Jewish heritage and has a delightful relationship with his loving grandparents, who support his cause but have some concerns about the effectiveness of his tactics. At the same time, however, he also has a side gig as a queer stand-up comic, taking time out from his activism to deliver a set now and then. (And you know, his jokes are actually pretty funny.) But they are an unusual pair of skills, to say the least, that begs a few questions. How did he discover he had a talent for comedy? How difficult is it to pursue both interests? Does what he learns practicing one skill help to inform the other? These may seem like small elements, at least compared to the significance of the environmental causes he challenges, but taking a few extra moments to dig just a little deeper might have helped us better understand how complex a person Greenberg appears to be. But the questions are never asked.
Similarly, at a staff meeting, the team argues to Greenberg that he needs to bring on a co-executive director to handle the group’s administrative activities, but he surprisingly resists what seems like a sensible and popular proposal. Why? Is it a question of control? Does he not want to share the spotlight? A short follow-up confessional could have been illuminative as to his state of mind, but again, the questions are never asked, and the issue of the group’s future operations is summarily dropped.
As a chronicle of how dedicated environmental activists use direct confrontation to speak truth to power and redirect public awareness to the crisis, the film does the job quite effectively. Yet the film misses the opportunity to give us a deeper understanding of why they do what they do, which would have made “Just Look Up” a decidedly richer experience.
