Review: “King Corn”

I approached King Corn, a documentary by friends Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, with a lot of optimism. I really enjoy feature-length documentaries (especially The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters), and this one, at least by the looks of the theatrical trailer, to be both entertaining and informative. Unfortunately, King Corn is neither.

Ellis and Cheney spent the entirety of 2005 growing an acre of corn on a farm in Greene, Iowa (where, coincidentally, both men’s great-grandfathers had lived and worked). They rented a one-acre plot, planted seed, fertilized it, watched it grow, harvested it, and attempted to follow it through the American food industrial complex. The point of King Corn? To show that corn rules in agriculture – the U.S. grows more of it than ever, and it infiltrates everything we eat – from corn-fed beef to high fructose corn syrup.

To call King Corn a documentary is too give it a bit too much credit. For most of the film, I felt like I was watching a video blog. I don’t mean production-wise – while it seems most of the film was shot with a single camera, I don’t mind that. But too much time was spent on the personal stories and activities of the filmmakers, and very little time was given to actual informative material. And when it came time for that, I was left wanting. Throughout the entire film, Cheney and Ellis look less traditional objective documentarians and more like high school students working on a school project – interviewing just enough people and doing just enough research to satisfy the basic requirements of the project. Instead of doing their own research, the filmmakers rely on the few experts featured in the film to provide most of the informational content. More time spent interviewing academic and industry experts and less time talking to New York City cab drivers and Green funeral home directors would have done King Corn a lot of good. And throughout most of the film, I kept thinking to myself, “What did these guys learn in college? I know they’re trying to seem objective, but they come off looking like idiots.”

The lack of research and definitive conclusions might have been excused had King Corn actually been entertaining. But the only time I found myself laughing was when I was watching the bonus features on the DVD – including one scene in which Cheney and Ellis take an old pickup truck, its bed full of their corn, and try to sell their harvest at the Chicago Board of Trade. The movie is slow at too many points, and when the movie finished, I was left to guess what the filmmakers actually discovered.

Overall, King Corn is a half-hour Discovery Channel documentary stretched into a two-hour feature-length documentary film. While the filmmakers were on the right track – Americans eat too much low nutrition food because cost is emphasized over nutrition – they failed to provide any new information, much less any solutions.

King Corn:

P.S. If you don’t believe how much corn is in the American diet, next time you’re at the grocery store, count how many times you see some kind of corn syrup in an ingredients list.