Gasland

This isn’t a Third-World country, we’re not living in a dystopian future and the movie you’ve just sat down to see is not an episode of Jackass. Those are all things to bear in mind as you watch American homeowners light their tap water on fire, demonstrating the degree of legalized pollution that’s accompanied the last decade’s uptick in domestic natural-gas drilling. (And this was supposed to be a clean form of energy.) After receiving an invitation to lease his Pennsylvania property for $100,000—his home is in the Delaware River Valley, which we’re told is the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas”—theater director Fox sets out to investigate exactly what that means. He finds visible air pollution, ravaged farmland and sick and dying residents. The movie that results is one of the most alarming and essential documentaries of the year: simple, direct, freely shifting in sensibility between clear-headed muckraking and the idealism of the best folk art, and guaranteed to get you outraged about a crisis that’s gone woefully underreported.

You might as well be exempt from air-traffic control. The problem stems from the so-called “Halliburton loophole” in the 2005 energy act, which allowed gas companies to refrain from revealing the chemicals they use in “fracking,” the drilling process. (An EPA whistleblower, who notes he’s not speaking on his organization’s behalf, tells Fox that if it’s the law to turn a blind eye, the agency is perfectly good at doing that.) Road-tripping across America, the first-time filmmaker encounters Wyoming residents faced with smog that’s worse than L.A.’s, among other bizarro-world statistics. Gasland risks being lumped in with other, more dew-eyed environmental documentaries, but it’s hard to imagine the movie inciting significant partisan argument—try watching it back to back with Sarah Palin’s Alaska—as opposed to reassessment of a government policy that favors corporate interests over the poisoning of citizens.

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