Mark Reviews Movies: PERCY VS GOLIATH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 29, 2021

The story of a single farmer taking on a multinational corporation, Percy vs Goliath is dry, shallow, and redundant. Director Clark Johnson clearly wants this to be an inspirational story about one person's ceaseless fight against powerful forces, both for his own good and the good of countless others, and maybe if screenwriters Garfield Lindsay Miller and Hilary Pryor didn't spend so much time voicing those intentions, the movie might have had some breathing room to actually tell that story.

Instead, the legal battle between Percy Schmeiser (Christopher Walken) and the agricultural technology company Monsanto becomes a series of courtroom scenes, speeches, and a lot of characters explaining the high stakes of the protagonist's fight over and over and over again. The real Schmeiser, who died at the age of 89 in October of 2020, became something of a folk hero for his legal travails, but this movie and Walken's underwhelming performance offer little about the importance of the fight and even less about the man at the center of it.

In 1998, Percy is preparing for his next crop of canola plants. Like his father and his grandfather and generations before him, Percy saves his seeds from one harvest to the next, avoiding the commercial, genetically modified seeds that Monsanto has been selling to farmers in his neck of Saskatchewan.

One day, though, Percy receives a letter from the company's legal team. There's suspicion that some of Monsanto's GMO seeds were planted on Percy's land. The company will take samples at their leisure, whether or not Percy is there or even wants them to, and if any Monsanto-brand canola plants are found, the farmer can either settle out of court for thousands of dollars and all of his seeds. He could risk a trial, too—the result of which could cost him hundreds of thousands or more and maybe his entire farm.

Of course, Percy, with the uncertain support of his wife Louise (Roberta Maxwell), decides to go to court. He hires Jackson Weaver (Zach Braff), a local attorney who is determined but isn't prepared for the legal force Monsanto is about to put upon him. Meanwhile, Rebecca Salcau (Christina Ricci), a representative from an ecological activist organization out of Washington, D.C., arrives. She wants to make Percy the spokesperson for the little guy, being trampled by Monsanto, and use his fight to argue that Monsanto should stop research on its next project—genetically modified wheat, which would change everything about the agricultural economy.

The mechanics of this story really are presented in such dully specific terms, while the heart of this tale—about one person's battle with a corporate behemoth, the treatment of farmers by companies like Monsanto, and the actual ecological and economic issues that arise from such naturally questionable and monopolistic practices—is reduced to one of a few talking points. Percy is a farmer, he says repeatedly in private conversations and in court proceedings and on stages around the world, and this is way he has been farming his entire life.

The lawyer makes his case in assorted courtroom scenes, which only serve to explain what the characters have already explained outside of them, and in talks with the Schmeisers about how much they could lose. Rebecca pushes and pushes Percy, without making much of a case about the ecological dangers or economic issues of GMOs. Louise wavers between standing by her husband and worrying about what will become of them that we're never sure what she actually believes. Her character feels more like a means of creating drama or pathos as required than an actual person.

None of these characters, actually, feels real. They have their go-to lines and arguments in pocket, ready to be stated at every possible opportunity—and never missing one. Percy receives letters and donations from ordinary people across the planet, telling us that the fight is important but never really explaining in a clear and concise way why that is. Walken appears and sounds more bored than aggrieved and determined, but who can blame him? Being directed to say, "I'm a farmer," dozens of times, with the hope that it'll carry all of the emotional and political weight of an entire movie, must have been tiresome.

It certainly is for us, who come away from this movie with only a general idea of Schmeiser or his importance to the agricultural industry and the environmentalist movement. Percy vs Goliath focuses, perhaps, on the wrong specifics and generalizes what really matters in this story.

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