Home

A triumph of candy for the eye over food for the brain, French filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Home—warmly narrated by Glenn Close, with a Philip Glass-inspired score by Armand Amar—combines stunning high-definition footage (especially in the Blu-ray version) with an environmental-warning script that ranges from the precise (20% of the Amazon rainforest has been lost to deforestation) to the maddeningly New Age-y vague (such as “the Earth is a miracle—life remains a mystery,” or a reference to “the mother cell that is shared by all forms of life,” or a shot of trees accompanied by the observation that “we are of the same family”). Essentially a very loose biography of our planet with a particular focus on humankind's staggeringly negative impact over the past 50 years, Home was filmed in 120 locations spread across 54 countries, and features images that easily rival those from the acclaimed BBC series Planet Earth and Earth: The Biography. Life sometimes really does imitate art: shots of Siberian ice patterns here bear a remarkable resemblance to the work of Jackson Pollock, while the shimmering water surrounding Australia's Great Barrier Reef suggests an impressionist painting by Monet. Although the images are absolutely breathtaking—from the high-tech oasis of Dubai to the balletic motion of machines harvesting wheat in Colorado—the narration consistently makes the viewer wonder if something was lost in translation (such as a distinction between “water and matter”—wait, water is matter; or the patently false claim that the first towns are less than 600 years old—Pliny the Elder wrote about British towns in his Natural History in the first century A.D.). Much of the alarm raised in Home is both real and justified (a brief closing segment on examples of good environmental stewardship worldwide sadly feels like a Hollywood ending), but the fuzzy language employed throughout unfortunately undercuts the important message. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)