POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold | Review

In the age of mutli-million dollar indie films, any filmmaker who desires a wide release for his film will need to have some sort of tactic for funding the project, be it from producers, sponsors, or holding tin cans on street corners. This is all fine and dandy until the gift-giver realizes, hey, I can get something out of this, and all but threatens the creative individual with demands that directly effect the final product. Often times, this is the producer or distributor going in and making cuts to make the film more marketable (ie. dumbed down). But then there are the more subtle, not-necessarily evil ploys, such as product placement. It is this last subject with which Morgan Spurlock’s new film POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is exclusively concerned.

Part of Spurlock’s schtick is to take hot topics, which are always at least vaguely political, and turn them into self-portraits. Super Size Me saw him nearly destroy his body by eating Mickey D’s for a month, and in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden, he aimlessly fumbled around the Middle East, doing his part to fight the war on terror by basically demonstrating the futility of fighting the war on terror. These are both stunts that start and end with their concepts – the ‘ending’ always being inevitable – negating the entire act of film-watching. POM Wonderful is no different.

The big idea here is that a film about product placement is being financed entirely via product placement. Ya get it? Let that sink in for a moment, and all of the cleverness and good ideas that the film contains will no longer be new to you come showtime. It is a simple, easily digestible guffaw that fits right into his oeuvre. Spurlock will become unhealthy after 30 days of Big Macs; Spurlock will not find Osama Bin Laden; Spurlock will fund his film about whoring out via whoring himself out: a career in a nutshell.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t pleasures to be had while watching the film. Because product placement is an inherently complex subject with a lot of potential, some meat does occasionally churn out from behind Spurlock’s grins and winks. His meetings with all of the execs provide a look at the goings-on of a bafflingly narrow-minded procedure. The things said and the glances exchanged between these people questions the very ability to define them as such. There is also a good deal of playfulness that, when it isn’t repulsively self-aware, keeps the whole affair at the very least amusing. When the film is abruptly jarred to a halt by an out-of-nowhere television commercial advertising a horse shampoo, alluded to about 45 minutes earlier in a meeting with that company’s advertising team, it calls for an unusual (for Spurlock) amount of work for the viewer to really get what’s going on.

In the end, though, the only brand that Spurlock’s film finally condemns is his own. The man is a money-making machine without the backbone to risk putting his name, and face, on a genuinely radical or incendiary idea. For these reasons, POM Wonderful is counter-productive. When pretty much all that one remembers from the viewing experience are the products themselves (POM, Mane n Tale, Sheetz, et al), the proof is shown to be what was known all along: product placement works out really well for sponsors, just as this film will work out really well for Morgan Spurlock.

Reviewed at the 2011 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival. Special Presentations Section.

90 Mins. April 30, 2011

Rating 2.5 stars