MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Yosemite’: Loving a Park to Death

In “Star Trek V,” vacationing Enterprise officers are able to enjoy the splendor that is Yosemite National Park centuries on into the future, and William Shatner is even able to climb one of the park’s massive granite formations without fighting fellow danglers for a spot on the rock.

Documentary film maker Jon Else seems a little less optimistic. His “Yosemite--The Fate of Heaven” (opening a three-day run Sunday at the Nuart) is an appropriately alarming look at the woeful overpopulation problem of California’s wilderness-vacation headquarters, complete with encroaching carbon-monoxide pollution and retreating wildlife.

“People just love Yosemite to death,” says the area’s local postmaster, effectively summing up the hourlong film’s viewpoint. To his credit, director Else doesn’t try to deny anyone’s right to love it. Though he does put plenty of neurotic city slickers and their identical motor homes on view for our distaste--which helps stack the man-versus-nature deck, “Koyaanisqatsi”-style--Else also shows us genuine nature lovers and the joy their visits bring them. Closing Yosemite to all camera-toting hominids for a few dozen years might help, it’s implied, but that isn’t this film’s recommendation.

In fact, it doesn’t have any. In lieu of suggestions or proposals, all it offers is an extremely ironic viewpoint, with footage of rampaging tourists and overworked rangers and clerks in current-day Yosemite set against voice-over readings from the awe-filled 1851 diary of Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, one of the first white men to come across the area. (Robert Redford, who served as executive producer for this Sundance Institute presentation, does the readings, which are the film’s only narration.)

Lest it sound like a heavy-handed preservationist tract, “Yosemite” is surprisingly quick-moving and entertaining, mostly as it captures talkative hikers and rangers in their natural habitat and nervous city dwellers in a most unnatural one. If only its photography was up to the task of capturing the full grandeur of its setting as well.

Playing on the same bill is “Ansel Adams, Photographer,” a half-hour, black-and-white short from 1958 showing the late lensman at work in the mountains and seaside and at play hovering over his beloved piano. It goes by breezily enough but will probably appeal more to photographers, who may marvel at the array and bulk of that bygone era’s equipment, than to environmentalists.