Environmentally and socially conscious documentaries often remind us, with a healthy dose of urgency and even anger, that there’s no time to waste when encouraging the responsible consumption of natural resources and exploring new alleys of achieving environmental sustainability. Filmmakers Joshua and Rebecca Harrell Tickell must know this time crunch all too well because the coherently solution-oriented Pump, the duo’s latest documentary which takes issue with America’s addiction to oil, loses no time in making its point loud and clear as Fitz & the Tantrum’s “House On Fire,” an instantly gripping tune with beats that resemble a ticking clock, plays on the soundtrack. Thus, narrator Jason Bateman’s initial words need not be “Time is running out.” Instead, he factually states, “Cars are a big part of American culture” and promptly establishes one related fact. When it comes to all other aspects of life, Americans enjoy a wealth of convenient choices. But at the pump, oil–and thus, oil companies–enjoys a nearly unchallenged monopoly.
The lengths that filmmakers sometimes take to raise awareness around their cause and to call civilians to action. Some eat nothing but fast food from McDonald’s for an entire month to start a conversation about the fast food industry’s impact on Americans’ health. Others take a 2-year cross country journey in a Winnebago (called “The Veggie Van”) that runs solely on processed, used cooking oil collected from fast food restaurants along the way. The latter story stars none other than this film’s co-director Josh Tickell, and is partly the subject of his 2008 Sundance Audience Award-winning documentary Fuel in which he tackled the same topic as Pump does, through a more personal and arguably more entertaining angle. Being a relatively drier and more lecture-heavy effort, Pump doesn’t necessarily induce comparably passionate outbursts and goosebumps. Yet, it’s also anything but a redundant effort. Instead of allotting a big chunk of its lean 88-minute running time to anger and finger-pointing, which many social-issue documentaries resort to, Pump effectively chronicles historical facts that eventually led to today’s oil-driven consumption pattern and refreshingly lands on credible (or at least convincingly argued) solutions: alternative fuels that could be made available to the American public at the pumps across the country. To their credit, the Tickells don’t aim to enrage with this film. They aim to educate as a means of driving action.
Every factoid in Pump is presented in a cause-and-effect string, starting all the way from the John D. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil Company monopoly of the late-1800s and the 1911 Supreme Court ruling that supposedly brought an end to it, to America’s transportation shift in the 1940s and 50s from rails to roads, encouraged by those who had large stakes in oil futures. The Tickells also describe the growing oil dependency driven both by corporate greed and personal irresponsibility, and the economic and military threat this poses on the country due to growing prices, increasing competition, and the scarcity of resources necessitating greater amounts of imported oil. The section Pump dedicates to China’s rapidly climbing reliance on and desire of cars (with a consequently growing need for oil) is especially illuminating in terms of the danger of the widening discrepancy between supply and demand, which ultimately drives the pricing at American pumps. But again, the Tickells don’t aim to make your blood boil by detailing alarming data. They smartly cut to the chase, and display a range of alternatives through talking-head interviews, among them Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva –the former president of Brazil, who is not only one of the country’s most popular politicians, but also a leader that took great steps towards the use of alternate energy and fuels- and Phil and Cheryl Near, the owners of Jump Start Gas Station in Wichita, Kansas, with a mission to educate their clients on the use of flex fuels.
The kick in the gut a la Who Killed The Electric Car this isn’t, but the Tickells’ hearts and minds are in the right place with this respectable addition to their resolution-driven collection of social-issue films. If nothing else, Pump will make you wonder whether you can hack your own car to make it run on an alternative fuel. Why not give it a try?
