Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 31/01
The Unforeseen (Documentary)
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B
Directed and Written by: Laura Dunn
Cast: Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, Wendell Berry, Gary Bradley, William Greider, Marshall Kuykendall, Dick Brown, Henry Brooks, Judah Folkman, Ronnie Perez, Pedro Perez. Voice of Wendell Berry
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 1/31/08
Opens: February 29, 2008
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Some time ago, years after I moved into an apartment complex that straddles the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, the Marriott Hotel chain put up a luxury hotel. Conforming to the law, the lodging made ample indoor space for parking in order that the streets not be cluttered with double-parked cars. The corporation went a few steps further, whether by ordinance or good will, to accommodate those who protested the additional air pollution that would result from the traffic into the hotel. The Marriott built several blocks of trees running up and down Adams Street, aka Brooklyn Bridge Lane, which not only beautified the area but soaked up the smog. More than one tree now grows in our fair borough.
This is an example of good development. One wishes Laura Dunn, in her striking, left-leaning documentary would have supplied examples like this rather than give viewers the impression that development is bad per se—although granted, at least one talking head, that of The Nation magazine columnist William Greider, did note that growth is desired provided that said expansion is good. (This sort of argumentation is too abstract. Greider could have supplied examples with filmed illustration since, after all, the cinema is a medium equipped exquisitely for both sound and sight.)
Still, Ms. Dunn's leftward leaning is not hell-bent radical as she portrays the central developer, one Gary Bradley, as a man who rose by America's proverbial bootstraps from a poor, rural life to change Austin, the capital of Texas, from a pristine land of clear water and salubrious climate into an overdeveloped city. Bradley's actions have presumably corrupted a waterway known as Barton Springs, loved not only by environmentalists but by ordinary people, even conservatives, who have used it to relax, to swim, even as shown in one scene to hang out with a turtle. By contrast, an underwater shot today shows that water to be translucent rather than transparent, one in which a swimmer could scarcely be recognized by her buddy following her a few feet away. This is the result of Bradley's dividing 4,000 acres of hill country into a fast-selling properties, bringing in people fed up with the freeways, smog, and tensions of Los Angeles into a dream-town that has now become an overcrowded, overdeveloped metropolis. Now, that's irony.
Austin, once known (like presumably Berkeley, California, Ann Arbor Michigan, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan) as a haven of liberal Democrats and assorted progressives, was faced with protests by two opposing sides in the early nineties while a bill drafted by the Texas legislature would have allowed developers a free hand to wreak havoc on nature. Ignoring a popular referendum that would deny further changes to their pristine town, the legislature passed the bill, which was vetoed by then governor Ann Richards—who became a hero to the progressives while vilified by those who took to the streets demanding "property rights" and carrying signs like "birds don't pay taxes." Richards was defeated in the gubernatorial election by George Bush, giving the latter the steppingstone he needed to advance his career. The rest is history.
While Lee Daniel's HD l6mm lens captured 150 hours of film, Dunn deserves praise for getting developer Bradley on camera as well as Dick Brown, once a major lobbyist for developers and a man who insisted that Daniel keep the lens away from his face while the lobbyist used his hands to build a model warplane from scratch.
Cloudy water is bad enough. To cap things off, cancer researcher Judah Folkman, with striking visuals at his command, compared the growth of tumors to the clogging up of the city's roads, indicating that both the human body and a town can deteriorate under explosive turnover. Robert Redford, sporting large round eyeglasses, calmly but with suppressed anger discusses how he moved from L.A. to Austin during the good times and is now dismayed at what has happened thanks to the greed of people who may not quite match up to the rapacious Daniel Plainview of Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood." One comes away from this film not in opposition to development per se but against extremism: the extremism that says private property is everything and the public be deuced.
The movie's title comes from a line of Wendell Berry's poem from a work, "Santa Clara Valley," that the writer intermittently narrates on the soundtrack
Not Rated. 93 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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