As frustrating as it is welcome, Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen" is an appeal to our emotions on a subject that needs the coldest, hardest facts.
The subject is land development - specifically, what 30 years of profit-bent private sector building has done to Austin, Texas. It's a topic of crucial interest to almost every American town, village, and city, and it inflames passions on both sides: Just this week a number of supposedly "green" show homes in the Seattle area were torched, allegedly by the Earth Liberation Front. The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, "The Unforeseen" gives us . . . poetry.
Wendell Berry, to be precise, which in itself isn't a bad thing. The writer reads from his poem "Santa Clara Valley" in the opening and closing moments of "The Unforeseen," and his cadences have a sonorous, apocalyptic ring: "What had been foreseen was the coming of the Stranger with Money/ All that had been before had been destroyed: the salt marsh/ of unremembered time, the remembered homestead, orchard and pasture."
The film gives us glimpses of Austin before the fall - 1972, when the state capital was still a sleepy college town - and introduces us to Gary Bradley, a real estate developer whose ups and downs wind snakelike through the story. He's the kind of man who looks at a patch of forest and says "Think of it as a blank canvas."
At the heart of both the issue and the city is Barton Creek Springs, which rises from a natural aquifer to feed the Barton Creek Pool, a swimming hole that generations of Austinites have enjoyed. (Executive producer Robert Redford reminisces about childhood weekends spent there learning to love nature; in a touching way the film, produced for The Sundance Channel, closes the loop.)
During the 1980s, Bradley blueprinted a new subdivision called the Circle C Ranch, which opponents charged would sap and pollute the springs. Pressed for cash, the developer sold control of Circle C to Freeport-McMoRan, an international mining corporation named by the EPA as the "#1 discharger of toxic contaminants in the US." Not surprisingly, a populist environmentalist movement rose up, defeating the builders in an all-night public session of the planning commission in 1992 and successfully supporting an ordinance preserving Barton Creek Springs.
Then the developers took off the gloves. Dunn interviews corporate lobbyist Dick Brown, who growls that "Austin is the last bastion of the counterculture in Texas." Just to let us know where he stands, Dunn films him painting little bombs to attach to his model aircraft.
"The Unforeseen" does give voice to proponents of property rights as well as environmental lawyers, to cowboy real estate salesmen as well as geologists. At the bottom of it all is a blinkered Lone Star chauvinism that Dunn hints the state will eventually choke to death on - a sort of "We'll mess with Texas ourselves, thanks."
In time, the Barton Creek Springs ordinance was gutted by a "grandfathering" bill; after Governor Ann Richards was defeated by George W. Bush, anti-development regulation was wholly repealed. At this point in the film, Dunn has nowhere to go but a sort of meandering, unfocused mourning, and "The Unforeseen" turns suddenly slack.
The film floats the idea that improving the existing housing stock could grow the economy for years, but Dunn doesn't offer any solid backup. She interviews kids standing on cinder piles and farmers walking down freeways; we meet a doughy, complacent couple - the easiest of targets - complaining their new subdivision isn't near a McDonalds. In the most egregious cheap shot, the movie shows a green line representing the gross national product trending up and a red line trending down that represents - what? Quality of life? National karma? We're never told.
A helicopter flyover of a massive new Austin
There are larger imponderables here, to be sure. What is it in one man that loves an empty piece of land and inspires another man to pull down trees and put up a condo? Dunn pretends she's interested but she really wants to make a polemic; the problem is she's made one that's impressionistic rather than convincing. What's sad is that "The Unforeseen" may be the last documentary word on the subject of overdevelopment. It deserves to be merely the first.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
