Directed by Shawn Bannon and written by Jamie Berger, what is the price some pay for the world’s pork? North Carolina residents take on one of the world’s most powerful companies in a fight for their rights to clean air, pure water, and a life free from the stench of pig faeces.
If you look into the history of a lot of governmental or commercial ventures, you’ll often find that smaller, rural communities, especially those with a minority population, tend to fall foul of testing, side effects and waste. Whether it be water, nuclear or in this case, pigs, it always seems that those in power will attempt to ignore the damage they cause, so long as it’s in an area that they deem of less value. The Smell of Money is another strong example, Black neighbourhoods getting slowly poisoned by waste and having their quality of life diminished, for the sake of lax safety procedures.
It’s one of many issues of institutionalised racism within America and that runs at the heart of The Smell of Money but unfortunately, it feels like the filmmakers don’t dig deep enough. There’s a fairly casual, even noted quality to the way this documentary moves which doesn’t do justice to the outrage that it calls for. Instead, it wanders through with a background of sadness, which only grows as time goes on.
Visually, it plays things mostly by the book with the exception of a few embedded news headlines which add a note of commercialism which doesn’t quite fit. The Smell of Money is at its strongest when it’s letting the residents do the talking. The women who have been directly impacted, the personal nature of their anecdotes and their determination to see the situation righted is admirable and captivating to watch. It’s just a shame the film doesn’t reflect their call for change.
The Smell of Money has an interesting and necessary story to tell, to explore how communities are still being taken advantage of in the name of capitalism. It follows the documentary playbook closely, the editing and general choices of shots are solid work but it’s missing a bigger energy. The tone of its subjects and the story itself calls for outrage and disgust but the film is walking the middle of the road, moving fairly slowly and struggles to hit a sharper note.
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