Dennis Harvey Film CriticThough few members of the public were still denying a link between smoking and cancer at the time, it was still nonetheless rather startling when the extent of the tobacco industry’s deliberate disinformation campaign on that subject got exposed about a quarter-century ago.
The déjà vu runs thick watching Jennifer Baichwal’s new documentary, “Into the Weeds,” which provides another illustration of coldblooded corporate denialism in the face of widespread harm.Here the culprit is agrochemical giant Monsanto, and their product Roundup, purportedly for some time the world’s most popular herbicide.
Borrowing from “Big Tobacco’s” playbook of yore, it appears the company set out to bury ample evidence of its carcinogenicity as long as it could, buying malleable scientists and discrediting more principled ones, refusing to apply warning labels, denying a causal relationship even as tens of thousands of cancer patients sued.
Those lawsuits (some still ongoing) are the focus here, in a film that’s more straight reportage than many of its director’s prior nonfiction features such as “Manufactured Landscapes,” “Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia” or “Anthropocene.” Though not as emotionally wrenching as some of its whistleblowing ilk (such as 2018’s similarly angled “The Devil We Know”), this Hot Docs opening-night premiere is still first-rate nonfiction storytelling that should attract interest particularly from broadcasters.Baichwal frames a complex issue — one she doesn’t muddy further by referencing the many other frontiers where Monsanto has drawn bitter controversy — by giving us a sole primary protagonist in the form of Dewayne “Lee” Johnson.
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