If you get an Oscar nomination for fearmongering based on rumors and lies, what do you get for debunking the Oscar nominee? Nothing, probably, but Phelim McAleer, who in “FrackNation” gleefully shreds assertions made in the anti-fracking documentary “Gasland,” should be content to have struck a blow for truth.
“Gasland,” by Josh Fox, was an elegiac, effective and extravagantly misleading warning about the supposed dangers of hydraulic fracturing for clean-burning natural gas, which amounts to our own underground domestic Saudi Arabia of fuel. Thanks in part to Fox’s stunts, such as lighting tap water on fire, there are several moratoria on fracking, including in New York state — which just leaked an environmental report concluding that fracking is safe.
McAleer, a whimsical Irish journalist with a pleasingly avuncular air, explains in a robustly entertaining and informative doc how Fox was wrong to imply fracking is unregulated and proves methane has been in some drinking water since long before fracking.
McAleer is more journalist than poet, so his film doesn’t have the emotional impact of Fox’s. And he goes off on an odd tangent or two, such as when he illustrates energy’s importance with the tale of a friend who donated a kidney. (The point is that surgery uses a lot of electricity, but who disputes that?) He also implies, without furnishing evidence, that Vladimir Putin is funding the anti-fracking lobby.
Still, McAleer is an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu. He interviews dairy farmers whose generations-old businesses are endangered — by fracking moratoria, which are keeping them from getting the checks they need to stay afloat. And in a spoof of a scene in “Gasland,” McAleer gets Fox on the phone. Click! Voice mail. It doesn’t look good when a documentarian refuses to answer questions. Even worse for the anti-frackers: a star of Fox’s film, who claims her drinking water in Dimock, Pa., is contaminated despite an EPA ruling that it’s fine, refuses McAleer’s mild-mannered request for a water sample, then lambastes him for being a foreigner and declares, “I am armed, I will tell you that.”