Surprise, surprise: a documentary that chronicles political maneuverings to legalize marijuana in Washington state plays it mellow. For 80 minutes, Riley Morton’s new film, Evergreen: The Road to Legalization, tries admirably to avoid taking the rah-rah road and sidestep opinion, but Morton’s own proclivities behind the camera are so clear that they eventually betray him; this is a movie that’s very clearly all-in on the idea of dissolving our country’s terrified view of marijuana usage and the culture that’s burgeoning around it. That’s not a problem, really, because even a documentarian is allowed to have personal bias. (Michael Moore and Errol Morris sure do.)
No, the true problem here is that Morton’s film is too slack. In following the ebb and flow of societal discourse on legalization of cannabis in Washington, and committing the minor civil war fought in the press, over the radio, and sometimes even at rallies, Morton somehow manages to render the entire topic inert. Evergreen is boring, and worse than that, it’s occasionally grating. His film, all told, supports legalization, and in its progressive, forward-thinking way, Evergreen deserves commendation; marijuana is so vilified in American communities that the very idea of making a film in favor of the drug feels pretty ballsy (even if said film is only received on a minor stage).
But documentaries should be compelling if not exciting, and Evergreen isn’t either. It’s content to lay out the facts, tell its audience the story of how a little initiative called I-502 came to exist, wound up at the center of controversy spurred by a contingent of medical marijuana users, and, eventually, passed into law in late 2012. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, and therein lies the rub: there’s little here you couldn’t have learned by just reading the Internet and brushing up on I-502 for yourself. There’s a good chance you know about this just from media osmosis. Maybe you heard the news via television while making breakfast one morning, or perhaps you happened to skim Facebook and stumbled upon the rare useful article posted to a friend’s feed before going back to trawling for Game of Thrones memes.
Through whatever means, you’re probably already familiar with the broader happenings of Morton’s film, and so Evergreen ends up feeling like 80 minutes of stating the obvious. But to what end? That’s even more unclear. Morton tackles his material from an instructive angle, but when he’s not simply telling his audience what they likely already know, his film works quite well; he offers a glance into the perhaps unexpected conflicts that arise as distinct, separate parties all lock horns over whether or not passage of I-502 is a good thing or just an empty gesture. The vitriol on display in specific spots actually comes as something of a shock.
So, good on Morton for capturing it. It’s just too bad he doesn’t have much to say about it. Evergreen presents itself bluntly (pardon), and it lacks a crystallized perspective of its own; if Morton stands on the side of the pro-502 crowd, he offers little commentary on the matter, instead allowing his talking heads to make the case for marijuana’s legalization. The benefits are obvious – legalizing pot means the government can exert control over it, regulate it, tax it, and make the world of reefer safer for burnouts and medical users alike. The cons are a bit less on the nose. Imposing intake limits (a la alcohol), for example, makes life a bit trickier for people who only smoke to nullify physical ailments.
Evergreen is at its best while peeling back layers of legal hypocrisy. One young woman recounts the smorgasbord of drugs, from Oxycontin to Methadone, she took before finding a better solution in marijuana; the rub, of course, is that nobody would ever pull her over for driving while under the influence of the former, but for the latter, she could get a serious slap on the wrist. Maybe this is the subject Morton should have focused on, rather than just going from point A to point B. There’s an entire film to mine out of the travails of medicinal marijuana usage, and Evergreen feels like it only scratches the surface in between being self-congratulatory.