'Fantastic Fungi'
Don’t worry, folks, because the offbeat and visually arresting documentary “Fantastic Fungi” knows the answer to one of life’s biggest questions: What happens when we die?
What happens — spoiler alert! — is that we become food for molds, yeasts, mushrooms and other types of fungi. They break us, and any plants and animals, down into nutrients that go into the ground and feed other plants, which feed other animals. And that’s how the circle of life rolls on and on.
If that doesn’t sound beautiful, you haven’t reckoned with the amazing time-lapse photography director Louie Schwartzberg and his team has shot and collected here. Mushrooms pop up jauntily, mold overtakes a strawberry, tendrils of mycelium create networks between trees, and so on. It’s really quite amazing.
Then the humans talk, and we learn how many different ways fungi can benefit us. Some, like mushrooms and mycologically grown meat substitutes, can nourish us. Some can eat oil spills. Some molds, like penicillin, fight off diseases. Others, like some forms of psychedelic mushrooms, could be used to treat depression and help terminally ill patients prepare for a peaceful death.
Schwartzberg lets us get to know some people who have devoted their lives to studying fungi. Most interesting is Paul Stamets, who began as an amateur biologist and has developed a fungi-based business and delivers impassioned TED talks about the subject.
“Fantastic Fungi” gets a little apocalyptic at times, particularly when narrator Brie Larson speaks, Lorax-like, for the fungi. The message is essentially that fungi were here before we humans started walking upright — and it’s up to humans whether we want to be part of the solution of cleaning up this planet we have messed up, or be one more pile of carbon-based material for the fungi to mop up when we’re dead. The fungi don’t really care either way.
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‘Fantastic Fungi’
★★★
Opened October 11 in select cities; opens Friday, November 15, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for discussions of drug use. Running time: 81 minutes.