Review: King Corn

After a battery of lab tests two college boys learn that due to their fast food diets their bodies have a higher concentration of fructose, maltrose and dextrose than blood. They embark on a road trip of the cornfields of the heartland to figure out how so much of it got from the cob into their bodies. 

That co-stars Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis coincidentally both have great-grandparents who farmed in Greene, Iowa blunts some of the exhaustion a viewer is legally entitled to when they hear the words "personal documentary".  Director Aaron Woolf sets up King Corn so that when the fish out of water laughs come they are at the (good-natured) expense of the fish and not the water.  Cheney and Ellis learn about subsidies, planting and nutrition by relying talking to local people, farmers and nutritional experts instead of heavy-handed voiceover. 

The duo plants an acre of corn and then attempts to follow where their acre winds up but find out that one acre (approximately 10,000 pounds) is such an insignificant amount in the vast sum of American corn production that it would be impossible to trace.  Using stop animation (to much less hokey effect than it sounds) they demonstrate how little corn grown in this country is directly consumed by humans. Instead massive amounts of low quality corn (genetically engineered beyond recognition and soaked in pesticides, natch) are used to feed cattle, create ethanol and as artifical sweeteners. 

The film does a fine job of illustrating the sheer absurdity of corn production in this country: it depletes soil, it's unhealthy (for both people and animals) and if not for vast government subsidies farmers wouldn't make a profit selling it.  And maybe not so coincidentally, the more large corporations have taken over farming the greater the subsidies have become, creating a system where generational family farms are going belly up while tax payers are subsidizing corporations to make increasingly unhealthy food. 

The scenes where the protagonists retrace their family tree is a bit of a weak point but the film's minor sins are forgiven when Cheney and Ellis track down Earl Butz, the influential economist of the Nixon administration who drafted the farm policies that still exist today. Butz, who was a young man during the Depression, now sees how little Americans spend on food as one of his greatest achievements. He's an economist through and through and Cheney and Ellis opt to not challenge his ideas (he's elderly but still quite sharp) on whether this savings is serving the greater good, no doubt thinking of how terrible Michael Moore came off haranguing a Charlton Heston-beseiged with Alzheimers in the final scene of Bowling for Columbine. 

King Corn is made with intelligence, humor and a sincere respect for people and the work they do.  Aaron Woolf has pulled off the unimagineable, making a documentary about nutrition and government subsidies that contributes to a larger discourse without being didactic or boring. 

King Corn is currently playing at the Red Vic Moviehouse in San Francisco and in limited theatrical release around the US. The film will also broadcast on the PBS "Independent Lens" in April 2008.

See also: Supersize Me, Hybrid, Darwin's Nightmare, Sicko.