I Am Greta (2020, Nathan Grossman) (Patreon)

65/100

Started watching with 99.9% confidence that I'd turn it off after 10 minutes—I'd seen Hulu's ad a zillion times, was sure that I knew what to expect and would have little to no interest. But I was caught off guard by the opening, which sees Thunberg sit down with her little sign outside the Riksdag and get completely ignored by virtually everyone who passes her. Because this footage was professionally shot, the possibility that she wasn't yet famous hadn't occurred to me—that would require Grossman (or someone, anyway) to have lucked into witnessing/documenting the birth of a massive global movement, just on the basis of Thunberg seeming potentially interesting.

Well, that's what happened. Grossman gets extraordinary access here, providing a perspective that, among other things, radically recontextualized my own initial view of Thunberg, which was heavily informed by her New York "How dare you!" speech. While I'd heard about her previously, that was the first time I actually saw a news clip; "It's great that someone finally got openly furious about this," I remember thinking, "but she seems borderline unhinged." Turns out there's a huge difference between reading that a teenage girl chose to sail across the Atlantic for two weeks, in order to reduce her carbon footprint, and seeing the psychic toll inflicted by that ethical stance. Thunberg spends the voyage dictating what I assume are journal entries (or maybe they're messages to her mother), one of which is so intense that I felt it tugging at my memory and finally realized what it reminded me of: Heather's snot-nosed close-up at the end of Blair Witch. (Thunberg's even wearing more or less the same hat!) What she does is not at all easy for her, and part of this film's value is allowing you to see her get both more angry and more blunt over time, as people in power keep praising her courage and fortitude but taking no action. I'd come in at the end of the movie, so to speak, a year ago, and seeing the whole thing from the beginning clarified a great deal. 

And that's strictly in terms of Thunberg's climate-crisis crusade. I Am Greta also serves, in a gratifyingly low-key way, as a portrait of someone on the autistic spectrum, demonstrating both the unique challenges they face and the unique advantages they possess. Thunberg herself speaks only to the latter, correcting a journalist who says that she "suffers from" Asperger syndrome and wishing aloud that more people would get monomaniacal about reducing emissions. But Grossman also captures intimate moments that suggest how difficult it must be to feel compelled into a spotlight that you'd normally shun. We see Thunberg, who's uninterested in small talk, meeting various world leaders and other celebrities, always being very polite but clearly having no idea what to say to them. We see her father struggle to make her eat something in the midst of a hectic travel day. We see her get fixated on minor details and resist any help or advice, more or less whining Dad out of their hotel room. We see her unable to fucking believe that other people at this climate conference are ordering motherfucking hamburgers for lunch. (Incredulousness hers; profanity mine.) Juxtaposed with these slightly awkward or anxious episodes are many, many beautiful shots of Thunberg in repose, often accompanied by her own (completely unrelated) thoughts in voiceover narration. She has a remarkable face, on top of everything else.

You know, the more I write about this film—and I've prattled on longer than I'd planned—the more I suspect that I may have quite literally underrated it. To be fair (to myself), the aspects upon which I've focused above don't necessarily predominate—they're just what most interested me. Grossman kinda plays it safe, delivering a film that more or less resembles what the average American might expect (and what I certainly expected) from a Greta Thunberg documentary. He also ladles an obnoxious score all over everything, and ends on a rah-rah note that makes I Am Greta retroactively feel more like simple hagiography + advocacy. But he was in the right place at the right time and got a surprising amount of the right footage. He did all right.