'No Impact Man' takes green to extreme

Colin Beavan, who spent a smelly year leaving no carbon footprints on Mother Earth, is the kind of earnest fellow who invites ridicule.

In his documentary "No Impact Man," he gets plenty of it. Beavan shrewdly defuses his own "guilty liberal" persona by citing the early criticism that greeted his ultra-green project. What's strange is how much of it comes from the environmental left. Whatever good he may accomplish by growing his own, composting, buying local, etc., they holler, is compromised by the fact that he might make a buck from it (aside from the movie, there's a book).

Later, poor Colin is attacked by the aging hippie with whom he grows vegetables near his Manhattan apartment. The man says Colin's a fraud because his wife, Michelle, works for Business Week, thus feeding the Big Capitalist Lie that prompts so much consumption and pollution. A chastened Beavan stands mutely by and endures this withering criticism, and that's a shame on a couple of fronts.

One, Michelle is such a likable gal, a meat-eating consumer of sun-grown coffees who talks openly of her deep and lifelong affection for "retail." She's a valuable foil to Colin, and her slow conversion to life without TV and frivolous things is the movie's most important dynamic.

Two, Colin's hippie beat-down follows the scene in which he accepts, from a capitalist pig, the donation of a solar panel. Take it from Ed Begley, Colin - for-profit technology is not always the enemy. Or consider the example of "Fuel," another documentary on sustainability that opens today - instead of avoiding goods transported by carbon-spewing vehicles, find a sustainable way to transport them.

Of course, that's its own rosy utopia. We're a long way from algae-based biofuel, and until that day, maybe watching less crappy television and spending more times with your kids isn't such a bad idea.

Distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures.