Film
When somebody wants to joke about extravagant tastes, nothing makes an easier punchline than the 3-dollar cup of coffee. A new documentary called Black Gold makes that morning-drive latte a bitter brew indeed. Cutting back and forth between consumer and grower, sibling filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis examine the economic disparity caused by collusion between the commodities markets in New York and London and buyers for Big Coffee, all of whom have a stake in keeping prices low.
On one continent—ours—a Starbucks manager talks about serving the people, while customers face choices no more taxing than grande or venti. On another continent—Africa—the children of Ethiopian coffee farmers who’ve been lowballed by resellers get turned away from aid camps, because they’re only “moderately malnourished.” Coffee runs second only to oil as the world’s most commonly traded commodity; at times Black Gold could pass for a caffeine-fueled Syriana—its implication being that every consumer choice has a butterfly effect that raises or capsizes people on the other side of the earth.
That struck Bongo Java impresario Bob Bernstein, who’s sponsoring the screening, on his first visit to Ethiopia in 2002. An advocate of the fair-trade coffee movement, which deals directly with farmers’ cooperatives to secure growers a living wage, Bernstein saw the economic repercussions of rock-bottom coffee pricing. After his fourth or fifth trip, Bernstein says, his choice became both obvious and painful: “Which farmer am I going to tell, ‘You get to eat, and you get to live in poverty’?”
Now Bernstein’s Fido and Bongo Java coffee houses serve nothing but organic and fair-trade beans purchased directly from farmers’ cooperatives. (Starbucks also buys a tiny fraction of its enormous demand from fair-trade and organic suppliers.) And for Sunday’s 7 p.m. screening at the Belcourt, he helped bring to Nashville the movie’s pivotal figure: Tadesse Meskela, leader of Ethiopia’s Oromia cooperative union, who is shown exhorting farmers not to shortchange themselves and their harvest. Meskela guided Bernstein around Ethiopia on his visits, and Bernstein hopes to return the favor. “He’s a rock star,” Bernstein says. “People flock to him.”
Bernstein admits he has reservations about fair trade, which he calls mainly “a needed first step.” And he adds that most consumers will never taste a drop’s difference between fair-trade beans and regular commercial product. See for yourself Sunday, when Bernstein and Meskela will have Ethiopian fair-trade coffee in the lobby for sampling. At the very least, Black Gold suggests, it won’t leave a sour aftertaste.
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• Infamous has the misfortune of being the second movie in a year, after the much-lauded Capote, to depict the writing of Truman Capote’s true-crime “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. Comparison is somewhat unfair—the two movies are as different in tone, shading and style as The New York Review of Books is from Vanity Fair—but Douglas McGrath’s elegant, epigrammatic version has the daring to see the malicious humor in the situation. “Imagine being told your writing lacks kindness by a four-time killer,” huffs McGrath’s Capote after a fruitless encounter with Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), the frustrated “artiste” whose murder of the Clutter family ensured him a fame his cowboy singing never could.
More forgiving of the author than Capote, which portrayed him (with justification) as both vampire and vulture, Infamous abandons its snappy comic tone once Capote and Smith sense a mutual attraction. Philip Seymour Hoffman had to overcome his own celebrity and larger build to become Capote from the inside out; in that sense, British actor Toby Jones owns the part uncannily from his first appearance. In keeping with the movie’s tone, he’s more brittle and blithe than Hoffman, cocking his head like a spaniel and leaning toward a speaker as if magnetized by gossip. And the supporting cast, from Sandra Bullock as a poignant Harper Lee to Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis and Juliet Stevenson as Capote’s high-society “swans,” maintains a fascinating balance between playing real people and figures in an entertainment—the line that In Cold Blood helped to obliterate.