Ah, people were always lousy… But there was a world, once.
Why it’s a left-wing film
The opening montage says it all. Various photographs reveal when the world’s downfall began, with the early days of American industrialization, and then take us straight through to present day (1972) with cluttered, claustrophobic shots of pollution, traffic, and over-population. In the year 2022, the end result of all this unbridled capitalism, technological advancement and baby-making is not a higher standard of living, an end to poverty, or the longer life expectancy we were promised. Quite the opposite. In Manhattan alone, there are 40 million people, half of them unemployed. The lucky ones barely sustain themselves on rationed food and water in small cramped apartments. The unlucky ones are homeless and sleep wherever they’re able to cram indoors to escape the smog and never-ending swelter of a year-round summer known as the Greenhouse Effect, another byproduct of that sinister free market.
But capitalism still isn’t dead. In fact, it’s more powerful than ever. Like African warlords, in this world if you control the food you control everything, and the big fat Soylent Corporation controls half the world’s food supply and seemingly all the political power. Naturally, the gap between rich and poor is now a canyon where a very elite few live the good life in swank high-rise luxury apartments complete with air conditioning, running water, real food, and “furniture,” or live-in prostitutes; accessories that come with the place.
This only makes sense. After all, capitalism run amok is almost certain to bring us a patriarchal society run by selfish men.
At its core, director Richard Fleischer’s “Soylent Green” is anti-human. We know this because the film’s conscience is Sol Roth (a warm, wonderful Edward G. Robinson in his final role) and he tells us so with the above quote. People are the problem, the scourge of the world. There’s just too damn many of us and we are now paying the price for destroying everything.
Of course this is all a left-wing fantasy come true, a cautionary tale that validates the environmental, socialist, and abortion movements. This is especially maddening because the complete opposite is true. As we advance as a free society, life only gets better and it’s been proven once and for all that the cure for poverty is a free and capitalistic society. Furthermore, not only do people live better under a free market system than under oppressive governments, the environment is far cleaner. Free people want clean air and water, they want parks and forests and the natural beauty of our world preserved, all within reason, of course. But our current environmental movement (which is nothing more than socialism in disguise) would lead us to the kind of totalitarian government that always leads to environmental degradation and a world that looks very much like “Soylent Green,” where the masses suffer under a very few elites who think they know best.
But unlike “1984”, the moral here is not that a few can control everything by controlling truth (the left in a nutshell), it’s that everything the left warned us about came true.
Why it’s a great film
Great films are usually some sort of love story and “Soylent Green” is a grand love story between Sol and Thorn (The Mighty Charlton Heston). Thorn is a cynical police detective not above the low-level corruption everyone seems to expect in this world and Sol is his “Police Book,” or researcher. The man charged and trusted with access to society’s few remaining research materials. In a world where each apartment dweller uses a Gilligan-style bicycle to recharge the car batteries needed to keep the lights on, you’re probably not going to see many computers.
Sol and Thorn live together, bicker like an old married couple, get on each other’s nerves, but also love one another. Sol remembers the world as it was, which is why he’s disgusted with the mankind responsible for destroying it. The much younger Thorn, though, has only ever known the world as it is and so he’s much more accepting and at peace with the way things are and therefore can’t recognize how this terrible reality rubs away at his own humanity. At heart, Thorn is a mercenary, only concerned with what’s his and holding onto it. Stepping through the masses of people forced to sleep on the hallway stairs outside of his apartment only deepens his resolve to look out for number one.
At first the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a high-level Soylent Corporation executive feels like just another homicide case to Thorn, another opportunity to steal the wealthy dead man’s luxuries, enjoy the “furniture,” a beautiful young woman named Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), and write the whole thing off as an unfortunate robbery gone bad, which will please his boss and secure the job he’ll hold onto at any cost. Unfortunately, things are more complicated than that.
A little investigative digging points away from a random robbery and towards the assassination of a man who carried a dark secret and was finder it harder by the day to keep it. As Sol’s research slowly uncovers the truth and he starts to see Shirl as a person instead of an object, Thorn suddenly finds the conscience he’s always tried to stifle, the conscience that will pit him directly against the Soylent Corporation and the corrupt and powerful system that keeps it in power.
“Soylent Green” does a marvelous job exploiting its concept. Though quite obviously filmed on a studio backlot and lacking the scope a bigger budget or CGI will give the eventual remake, in many ways this works at creating the generic and claustrophobic qualities the film is remembered for. While there’s little for the eyes to feast on, on a gut level you get a very good sense of the crowded emptiness of this world, a feeling that lingers long after the credits roll. Where the story really succeeds is on an emotional level. Watching Sol and Thorn delight over hot water, fruit, air conditioning and a leaf of lettuce really brings home what life is like for these characters in a way no amount of money or fancy special effects ever could. As a matter of fact, the scene where Shirl convinces Thorn to stay the night, promising him sex, a hot shower, and breakfast the next morning is the best in the film.
The acting is wonderful, especially Robinson whose poignant final scene in which he sacrifices his own life to a “death panel” in order to help Thorn solve the Big Mystery is especially poignant when you consider this would be the last time we would ever see the actor himself on screen. And no one played characters like Thorn as well as Chuck Heston. As brittle and hardened as he is, you can always sense something better underneath which makes the waiting for it to be revealed one of those cinematic pleasures that has little to do with scripting or direction and everything to do with what only a truly great actor can do.
Finally, some props for Joseph Cotten, who only has a short scene or two before his character is killed off. Because the presence and memory of that character is vital to move the story, the casting of an actor like Cotten, someone who we immediately identify with and warm to was a brilliant move on the director’s part.
The film works because the story’s themes transcend the political message. “Soylent Green” is about the search for truth, self-sacrifice, and appreciating the everyday blessings of friendship and the taste of strawberry jam.
What’s not on the list
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006): One of the most disturbing phenomenon’s in political comedy today — and we see it with Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Joy Behar, etc. — is how the wealthy and powerful in Hollywood and media now hold everyday people up for ridicule. No longer are the powerful the targets of satire. Instead, the powerful come after us and it’s about as funny as watching a bully beat up a smaller kid.
“Borat’s” entirely too smug, superior, proud of itself and mean-spirited to be considered good.
To their credit, “Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles would pick the right targets with their follow up “Bruno,” but other than a couple of scenes, that movie was simply too disgusting to ever watch again or recommend.
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