Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.What just might be the scariest movie of the year doesn't feature skyscraper-crushing robots or species-annihilating bacteria. The setting of Jon Shenk's documentary The Island President is the tranquil and paradise-like island nation of the Maldives. The star, Mohamed Nasheed, is a perky rights activist-turned crusading environmental politician. The villains are China, India, the United States; indeed, most of the nations of the world. The threat is rising sea levels that are already grinding away at the Maldives' coastlines and will, within a matter of decades, drown the nation entirely. As Nasheed points out during a press interview in New York, his nation is just the canary in the coal mine: "Manhattan is as low as the Maldives."
Shenk's film doesn't waste time trying to create a nuanced portrait of its subject, and it's easy to see why. The environmental movement has rarely had a true broad-appeal hero. Normally its spokespeople are academics with a limited audience or celebrities who make up for in passion what they lack in ability to actually effect change. For all that his nation lacks in people and power (400,000 people scattered over some 1200 islands), Nasheed makes up for it in indomitable drive, a curiously endearing brand of angry optimisim, and a willingness to do whatever it takes (including a photo-op "cabinet meeting" held on the ocean floor with all the ministers in scuba gear). Every cause should have somebody like him leading the charge.
Nasheed's passion, as shown in Shenk's intimate and admiring film, would be remarkable in most individuals, not least somebody like himself who spent several years imprisoned for his democracy activism, which included a long stint in solitary confinement and two bouts of torture, under the three-decade rule of the dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Making his story more incredible is that after returning from exile, Nasheed helped pressure Gayoom to hold elections and was then elected as president in November 2008. By March of the following year he had already pledged that the Maldives would be completely carbon-neutral in just ten years. As one of the only developing world leaders not to take the stance that carbon emissions control needs to be handled by the developed world, Nasheed occupies a unique place in the world body politic. So the film's climactic sequence finds him in December 2009 shuttling between rival factions of the nearly 200 nations gathered at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, a needling and indefagitable champion of the need to do something to keep carbon emissions low enough to keep the Maldives from drowning. There are times when The Island President suffers from its over-attention to Nasheed. Shenk has worked as a cinematographer before, which is no surprise once you see the eye-popping crystal-blue imagery he conjures up here of this impossibly fragile archipelago. A mix of moody Radiohead tracks backgrounds the otherworldly scenery and adds to the science-fiction feel of this paradise threatened by apocalypse. But by focusing so narrowly on Nasheed's environmental cause, the film ignores nearly every other aspect of his rule. For viewers who know nothing else about Nasheed but this film's one-note portrait, they'll be surprised to discover that he was forced to leave office in February 2012 after a rumored coup attempt. Even without that news, though, The Island President is much like its subject: hopeful but frustrated. As much as Nasheed believes that he and those who understand the threat are on the side of the angels, he also knows -- as he states in a righteously despondent speech to the United Nations -- that, "deep down, we know that you're not really listening." The happy warrior knows that papers might be signed and talks given, but the carbon level in the atmosphere keeps rising, as does the ocean around his beautiful, doomed home.
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