Though the focus is on Julia's Joan-of-Arc-like commitment and the intent is to look at the various issues involved, I mostly came away from this film with an intensified contempt for stinkin' hippies. It's not that I disagree with their ideas; I just loathe the cliché of that lifestyle. I've never met a hippie who seemed genuinely happy – they invariably reveal themselves to be tight-wound, angry, confused, and sorely lacking in the supposed spirituality and connection they profess to promote. I mean, how much self-loathing does it take someone to decide that mismatched hemp clothing, anemic diets, and frequent pot smoking is the answer? The genuinely happy ones may be worse – they just seem like drones. What I really wanted with Butterfly was an insightful look at what drives someone to go live in a tree. I mean, what really drives them – for it can't just be a vaguely defined "spiritual journey" or the mask of protesting some political issue or another. Though Julia comes across as quite a bit more self-aware than most of her activist cohorts (who simply seem humorless), she carries the same skitterish groundedness that Alanis Morrissette has – a playful peacefulness I admire, yet still want to smack down. But I never felt I was seeing the "real" Julia Hill … or maybe I just want everyone to cry before I can believe them. Curiously, it is the supposed "villains" who come across as the most sensible people in the film, such as "Climber Dan," a logger charged with chasing treesitters down from their perches. He rightly points out that the environmental activists portrayed are far from innocent of raping the earth for its comfortable bounty (using paper, plastics, cell phones, whatever). And while I don't want to suggest that a hatchet-job was in order, I did feel that the director made little attempt to balance the equation, so the end result is little better than a "LifeTime Intimate Portrait" of the Tree Girl. By the end of the film, I hadn't been politicized or even particularly informed of what, if anything, had been accomplished, except some hippies getting attention, mainly from other hippies. I also wanted to find out what Julia Hill did after descending the tree – and was left to supply my own postscripts, such as the one where she goes and lives in the breakroom of a Kinkos for two years to protest paper waste, but this time gets no media attention because not even the employees are certain she doesn't just work there.
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