The Last Mountain, the new feature from writer-director Bill Haney, will likely attract socially-conscious documentary enthusiasts purely on the basis of its creator’s previous film. That feature, The Price of Sugar (2007), was a bracing portrait of Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic, who toil in a twilight world of grueling, fearful pseudo-slavery. Four years later, Haney and co-writer and editor Peter Rhodes have collaborated again, this time to present an urgent story that lies much closer to home. The Last Mountain sketches the players and conflicts surrounding the fate of Coal Mountain, West Virginia. From there, it roams to touch on topics as diverse as air quality, labor rights, and climate change. The film lands in St. Louis this week as a part of the Stella Artois St. Louis International Film Festival, where it will be screened with Chris Cresci and Ben Mullinkkosson’s documentary short Among the Giants and Adam Fisher’s comic micro-short Timber.
There’s no doubt where director Haney’s sympathies lie, and that’s with the local residents who have suffered under the environmentally destructive practices of the rapacious Massey Energy, which has ongoing plans to demolish Coal Mountain via “mountaintop removal” mining. Like any work of outrage-fueled agitprop worth its salt, The Last Mountain gets its viewers’ blood moving with a nimble blend of startling scientific fact and barefaced emotional appeal. The film’s viewpoint has a high-profile assist from the presence of environmental activist Robert Kennedy, Jr., who serves as a kind of trail-guide for the political, cultural, and environmental terrain. It doesn’t hurt that the antagonist of the story is the cartoonish Don Blankenship, the arch-conservative former chairman and CEO of Massey, who seems pleased with his reputation as a mustache-twirling corporate villain.
Alert viewers may catch some of The Last Mountain’s scientific elisions and questionable logical leaps. Haney ultimately hobbles his credibly by leaning on Kennedy to the extent that he does, as the film neglects to mention the man’s anti-vaccination crankery. Nonetheless, when the viewer is confronted with the stark public health and ecological costs of mountaintop removal—and the egregious track record of Massey specifically—it’s hard to see The Last Mountain as a work of mere axe-grinding. The film offers a succinct and disturbing window into an oft-neglected slice of contemporary America, where a plethora of pressing political and economic conflicts converge. Although it lacks the white-hot righteousness of The Price of Sugar, The Last Mountain serves as a vital primer on the distressing powerlessness of ordinary citizens in the face of short-sighted avarice and apathy.
The Last Mountain screens at the Wildey Theatre in Edwardsville, Ill. Saturday, November 12 at 4 p.m. Tickets are $12, $10 for Cinema St. Louis Members. For advance tickets, call 314-725-6555, ext. 0, or visit cinemastlouis.org. St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.
