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We find ourselves at an interesting moment in the streaming wars; one where Amazon’s programming policy has apparently shifted to simply giving a massive platform to authority. Last week saw the release of the Melania Trump film (a grating vanity project it paid $75m for) and this week it’s our turn, with the platform releasing the King Charles documentary Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision.
Why Jeff Bezos would want to curry favour with the most powerful people on the planet by paying to air uncritical profiles of them is anyone’s guess. Either way, as a film, Finding Harmony is intensely frustrating to watch. It is ostensibly a relatively important climate crisis documentary, undone by its own innate sense of chippy entitlement. Perhaps a better title would have been King Charles: Needless to Say I Had the Last Laugh.
Running to 90 minutes – but feeling much longer, like the sort of thing designed to run on a loop in the background of a conference – the core message of Finding Harmony is that the world is in trouble, but only because we didn’t listen to the king. He is, we are told via Kate Winslet’s awestruck narration, “a man who has spent a lifetime building harmony”, which might come as a surprise to anyone who has read Prince Harry’s book.
The fawning tone continues, with Charles telling us that he saw environmental collapse coming as long ago as the 60s, and interviewees pointing out that “people dismissed him as crazy”. We see him champion organic food, and headlines calling him a lunatic, before we’re reminded that his once-fringe beliefs have now become fully mainstream.
This is the key frustration. Because, ultimately, he is right. Even with all the undeniable scientific evidence at our disposal, it is still impossible to make people take the climate crisis seriously. Had we all possessed the king’s foresight four or five decades ago, there is every likelihood that the world would be in a better state than it is now.
However, the film carries the thrumming sense that King Charles was out on a limb by himself, which does rather discount the influence of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson and the founders of Earth Day. This is only exacerbated when the film tries to expand the other threads of the king’s nebulous “harmony” philosophy.
These include the restoration of Dumfries House, which we’re told has helped to train the local community in traditional pursuits (and neglects to mention that it was at the centre of a cash-for-honours scandal). We’re also shown how the king has paved the way in the field of teaching prisoners to bee-keep, and told how he helped to rebuild Kabul by educating liberated locals about art.
If the latter sounds familiar, it’s because it formed part of Bitter Lake, the Adam Curtis Afghanistan documentary, which had a clip of women reacting incredulously to an image of Duchamp’s urinal. In fact, Finding Harmony often resembles one of Curtis’s films, in the way that it tries to link a bunch of disparate claims with a churning array of stock footage.
Among these claims: walking through forests is good because pine particles enter your blood; the housing crisis is down to people not wanting to live in ugly tower blocks; and the universe is filled with patterns that repeat throughout space and time in a demonstration of harmonious mathematics that affects our emotions and wellbeing. This last one, it has to be said, comes a little out of the blue, as if King Charles dropped a sneaky tab of acid then spent the afternoon staring at the back of his hand.
Perhaps this is why the film ended up on Amazon. The BBC, you sense, would have pushed back on some of the more ostentatiously woo-woo elements. Plus, as a corporation so nervy about the climate emergency that even David Attenborough has to go elsewhere when he needs to drive a point home, it might have tried to undercut the king’s environmental warnings with footage of Jordan Peterson calling it hooey. And that really wouldn’t do, especially in a film that feels precision-engineered to underscore the king’s legacy.
Either way, it will be fascinating to see how this does on Amazon. Twenty years ago, a film with this level of access to a British monarch would have aired on a terrestrial channel, and people would have watched in their millions, if only for the fact that nothing else was on. Here it will find itself nestled in a submenu alongside MrBeast and an Italian brainrot cartoon. Who knows if the king of England can compete with that any more.
