Documentaries are rarely short on impactive power. Love him or hate him, Michael Moore revved up the healthcare debate after unleashing Sicko, and crackdowns on fast food proliferated after Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. Though stirring, documentaries in the Moore/Spurlock tradition often lack nuance, which is the glaring flaw of The Town That Was, a bland documentary that squanders an interesting subject with unrefined populist outrage.
The film details the fall of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a once-typical mining town that now stands on a searing and noxious anthracite coal fire. The fire began in 1962 and could continue for hundreds of years. As the subterranean fire became more and more of a health hazard in the decades after it was lit, Centralia’s citizens moved out. The government generously compensated homeowners who chose to leave and, as one local puts it in the film, the homes displaced families bought with government money were “a hell of a lot better than what they had [in Centralia].” Only 11 people currently remain.
Directors Chris Perkel and George Roland ignore pesky details and frame the story of Centralia as pure government scandal, slick politicians ravaging an idyllic American community. They emphasize time and again that, in the first few weeks of the fire, the government may have been able to control the burning, caused by a trash fire, if it had acted more quickly. The directing duo also tries to make the government buyout of town homes seem hypocritical since Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornberg promised, “no one…will be forced to sell their properties.”
The filmmakers seemingly forget the buyout was voluntary, and that, even though the town has been condemned, the government still allows stubborn residents to live there, continuing utilities and mail service. It is true that a speedier response may have been able to save the town, but it’s not like anyone is going to be completely ready for such a bizarre catastrophe. More importantly, the directors gloss over the fact that the Centralia Fire Department started the fire and initially allowed it to spread. The doltish municipal firemen get off without much blame in The Town, but the state and federal governments receive an undeserved thrashing.
Even more egregious than their witless portrayal of the government is the filmmakers’ martyrizing of John Lokitis, one of the town’s few remaining residents and a central focus of the film. During his days in the empty ghost town of modern Centralia, Lokitis mows blocks upon blocks of grass for no one, puts up Christmas decorations few will see and repaints decaying municipal benches that won't be used. The town’s most active citizen is made the endearing David to the government’s Goliath, fighting tooth and nail when the postal service tries to incorporate the (nonexistent) town of Centralia into another county for mail purposes. In reality, Lokitis is a manic, tragic figure who fights for a lost cause. If the directors had put down their populist pitchforks and delved into his complicated psychology—his compulsive desire not only to remain in the abandoned town, but to prune it needlessly—then The Town That Was could have been an engaging movie tackling an incredible event as well as a compelling psyche. As it is, the earnest doc is so flimsy that it barely manages to drag through its measly 70-minute run time—feeling as endless as the fire it catalogs.
