July’s flooding damaged Montpelier’s Savoy Theater, one of Vermont’s most important cultural institutions. A new memoir from its founder, Rick Winston, details the theater’s early decades as a landmark purveyor of indie and foreign films.
In 1989, the Savoy was where I saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. In April, it was the first local theater to screen Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, fresh from its 2022 premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and arguably just as exciting and controversial as Lee’s film was in its day.
If you didn’t notice How to Blow Up a Pipeline during its brief local run, that’s because today’s indie films struggle to find a theatrical audience. I’m as guilty as anyone of “waiting for streaming.” You can now watch this eco-thriller on Hulu or rent it elsewhere. But please also catch a film at the Savoy, which reopens this Friday, September 1.
The deal
Eight young people converge on a desolate cabin in West Texas, bearing materials for homemade explosives. Their mission is to blow up a section of nearby oil pipeline, driving up global prices to hasten the end of fossil fuels — all without causing an oil spill.
As their plan unfolds, the narrative periodically flashes back to show us how each ended up here. Shawn (Marcus Scribner) was recruited by Xochitl (Ariela Barer), a college student whose mom died in a heat wave. Xochitl’s childhood friend Theo (Sasha Lane) grew up in a refinery town and developed terminal leukemia. Theo’s girlfriend, Alisha (Jayme Lawson), is struggling to overcome doubts about the plan.
Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is a young Indigenous man who taught himself to build explosives to fight back against the industry that decimated his ancestral lands. Working-class Texan Dwayne (Jake Weary) had his homestead seized for the building of the pipeline. Rowan and Logan (Kristine Froseth and Lukas Gage) look like a couple of club kids, but they also have vital roles to perform.
And one of these people just might be a mole for the authorities.
Will you like it?
Every year of wild weather brings home the reality of the climate crisis. Yet cinema rarely attempts to depict this threat to humankind, with the exception of a few hyperbolic disaster movies and Oscar-bait environmentalist films. The reasons are obvious: Climate change is too diffuse to be cinematic, too much of a downer, too politically charged. It’s a tough topic for fiction to broach without getting academic or preachy.
Goldhaber, who made his name with the thriller Cam, cuts through all those objections by giving How to Blow Up a Pipeline the propulsive form of a heist movie. The film takes its name from Andreas Malm’s 2021 manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, which argues that climate activists should embrace sabotage as a tactic. Xochitl expresses that view in the film, describing the attack on the pipeline as “self-defense.” Alisha, by contrast, fears the consequences of violence. Michael seems eager to burn everything down.
The film’s characters rarely sit still long enough to debate ideas, however. They’re almost continually in motion, and the tightly paced narrative sweeps us up and makes us root for them whether we endorse their last-resort approach or not.
Goldhaber makes shameless use of time-honored techniques of pulpy action filmmaking: quick cuts, zooming in on key objects, interrupting the story with flashbacks at cliff-hanger moments. And damned if it doesn’t all work. Shot on 16-millimeter film for a gritty look, How to Blow Up a Pipeline combines low-budget simplicity and clever orchestration into a thrill ride that might remind you of beloved ’80s action flicks. There’s no bloat here.
Likewise, the script (by Goldhaber, Barer and Jordan Sjol) is all efficiency, sketching each character’s backstory in swift strokes. While the movie has a clear point of view, the dialogue doesn’t hit false or hokey notes, and the actors make us believe in their characters’ convictions and fears.
Most environmentalist movies encourage nothing more aggressive than voting and donating to good causes. This one presents a provocative call to action in a highly entertaining package — a combination that some authorities appear to find worrying. According to a May story in Rolling Stone, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and 22 other state and federal law enforcement agencies have warned that violence could result from How to Blow Up a Pipeline — even though, according to an expert quoted in the article, the movie is not the “step-by-step guide” its title might suggest.
Whatever you think of Malm’s thesis, it’s hard not to share the frustration that clearly motivates the film. All that well-intentioned voting and donating doesn’t seem to be doing much. With breathless immediacy, Goldhaber offers a master class in making activist films less polite and more, well, explosive.
If you like this, try…
Night Moves (2013; Crackle, fubo, Peacock, Plex, Prime Video, Redbox, the Roku Channel, rentable): One of acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt’s lesser-known films is this eco-thriller about activists plotting to blow up a dam.
End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (2021; Peacock): Shannon Kring’s documentary pays tribute to the Indigenous women who risked their lives to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The Battle of Algiers (1966; Criterion Channel, Max, rentable): How to Blow Up a Pipeline reminds us that political films don’t have to be talky or dull. But that’s no surprise to anyone who’s viewed Gillo Pontecorvo’s taut classic about the Algerian struggle for independence.
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This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2023.
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