Film Journey reviews “The Unforeseen”
Film Journey’s Doug Cummings wrote a nice review for the film. In his intro, he also neatly summarized the marketing challenge the film faces.
The Unforeseen
On executive producer Terrence Malick's initiative, filmmaker Laura Dunn has crafted a rare entry in environmentally or socially conscious documentaries of late--a movie bristling with information but also with significant formal beauty. Its juxtaposition of facts, figures, and interviews with aerial and underwater imagery, along with Wendell Berry's poem "Santa Clara Valley" (narrated by the author himself), provides a multilayered examination of what it means for society to "develop" and "grow" while depleting its natural resources.
The setting is Austin, currently the 16th largest city in America, a lush oasis situated on the banks of the Colorado River in the rolling hills of central Texas. In the late-'60s and early-'70s, it became a hub for indie music, progressive culture, and nature lovers that soon attracted substantial commerce and real estate development--the city's population reportedly doubles every 20 years, three times the national average. Thus, it has become a hotspot for the clash between environmentalists and developers, and no site is more controversial than the beloved Barton Springs, a popular swimming hole connected to the Edwards Aquifer, one of the major groundwater systems of Texas.
The film traces the story of Austin's development in the last few decades through a combination of archival and original footage, and sophisticated computer graphics that fuse together real estate plans with detailed satellite maps. In a move that might surprise viewers expecting agitprop, director Dunn chooses to focus on controversial developer Gary Bradley as a kind of tragic protagonist, a failed businessman of the '80s savings and loan crisis who collected millions of dollars for a Barton Springs subdivision he never completed; Bradley has since filed for bankruptcy but has also been charged with fraud.
Yet Dunn's film seeks Bradley's point of view, telling his story beginning with his nostalgic west Texas childhood, and culls some of the film's most poignant and emotional moments from his extended interview. The film is honest about its point of view--that unchecked development is detrimental to society--but adheres to systemic critiques rather than casting individuals as villains. (The closest it comes is its offscreen interview with a corporate lobbyist who, constructing model war planes, opines about his success at promoting "grandfathering" bills that exempted developers from complying with environmental regulations.)
The film also showcases the kinds of deals that provide conduits for transnational corporations with abysmal environmental track records--like Freeport-McMoRan, the company that took control of Bradley's project--to slip into local development. Freeport has been widely accused of human rights and ecological abuses in Indonesia, where it serves as the country's largest taxpayer, and its involvement in Austin has been no small source of controversy in recent years.
Along with politics and history, The Unforseen is particularly good at illuminating the science of its debate, as USGS researchers explain how surface groundwater collects underground, spreads across the state, and potentially contributes to wide ranging contaminants in essential human resources. ("As a developer," Bradley says, "all I need is water. I can't make water, that's something that has to be there . . . it's the lifeblood.")
One of the film's central paradoxes is that development happens in beautiful places but often destroys precisely what makes those places so special in the first place, an obvious problem for anyone who has watched their favorite natural locales be overrun by housing tracts, but it's particularly well articulated in the film; what really is the American Dream and is it truly sustainable? "[Developers] know the costs of everything," one political activist says, "but the value of nothing." One of the movie's most effective metaphors involves comparisons to another complex system--the formation of tumors due to uncontrolled cell growth. Too much of a good thing often results in calamity.
Much of the film's striking cinematography is due to the work of Lee Daniel, who has done exceptional work with Richard Linklater for many years; Dunn incorporates footage Daniel shot on 8mm in the '80s, and some of his images of a raging storm--rain drizzling horizontally across a window, flashes of lightning, and its soggy aftermath--are among the film's most potent. Footage of Barton Springs' crystal clear waters in 1996 are compared with murky views shot in 2004. The film emphasizes expansive, wide angled imagery that evokes the scale of its subject, but also helps generate a contemplative space for the viewer. Scenes of unspoiled nature and urban sprawl alike highlight timely questions rooted in physical spaces but pertain to values and decisions that will affect our material and spiritual worlds for years to come.
The Unforeseen will be distributed theatrically in Los Angeles next March, and will be broadcast on the Sundance Channel in July. (Robert Redford, who learned to swim in Barton Springs, is a co-executive producer of the film and one of its interview subjects.)
My favorite documentary at AFI FEST turned out to be one I had initially passed on. The Unforeseen was described in the catalogue as “the story of how big developers spoiled a city treasure, and about the consequences continued development has on us all,” which didn’t exactly sound like cinematic gold. But after talking with Variety critic Robert Koehler, who assured me that I couldn’t miss it, I did some last-minute rearranging and was very glad I did.
Sadly, the film will become even more relevant as we witness bankruptcies hit bigger home builders, mortgage lenders and investment firms. (Thanks Mish)
