Hammer to Nail Reviews Barefoot: The Mark Baumer Story

At Hammer to Nail, Christopher Reed reviews a new documentary directed by Julie Sokolow about the poet, Mark Baumer, who died while walking across the United States to raise awareness about climate change. Reviewing the way the documentary contextualizes Baumer, situating him within a community, Reed writes that although "he was alone on his walk, he is not alone here." More: 

Joining him to comment on the action are his mom and dad, girlfriend, members of FANG, and co-workers and friends. All feel passionately about the same environmental causes, and mourn the loss of the man they loved. He was a complex soul, who wrote poetry, worked at a Brown University library and followed no one’s path but his own. Indeed, if the film has a central theme, it is about how difficult it can be to live an unconventional life in our modern times. You just might die from it.

Though Sokolow does spend some time on the gruesome details of Baumer’s final day, that end defines neither the narrative nor her subject. For most of the movie’s not-quite-90-minutes, we are with Mark as he joyously photographs the different legs of his trip, a delight that turns sour when he laments the state of the Earth and the campaign (and then victory) of Donald Trump. This was the fall of 2016, after all, and that unexpected electoral outcome spelled disaster for all the climate policies of the Obama era (which, though nice, were in and of themselves hardly adequate to address our looming global catastrophe), and for so much more. We feel you, Mark, as you yell into your selfie-stick-mounted iPhone. Your diatribe is ours, too.

Read more at Hammer to Nail.