watch The Great Invisible (2014) free online
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Director: Margaret Brown
Stars: Meccah Boynton-Brown, Doug Brown, Bob Cavnar
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. It killed 11 workers and caused the worst oil spill in American history. The explosion still haunts the lives of those most intimately affected, though the story has long ago faded from the front page. At once a fascinating corporate thriller, a heartbreaking human drama and a peek inside the walls of the secretive oil industry, "The Great Invisible" is the first documentary feature to go beyond the media coverage to examine the crisis in depth through the eyes of oil executives, survivors and Gulf Coast residents who experienced it first-hand and then were left to pick up the pieces while the world moved on.Fiery video images bring us back to April 20, 2010, the date that a horrific explosion occurred aboard the Deepwater Horizon, a Transocean-owned, BP-leased rig positioned above the deepest oil well in history. The blaze claimed the lives of 11 workers, and the uncapped well gushed an estimated 4.2 million barrels of oil into the sea over the next 87 days, in one of the worst man-made environmental disasters on record. Among other things, Brown’s film represents a conscious attempt to hear from those impacted by the catastrophe, and also to offer a catalogue of BP’s moral negligence, from its corner-cutting safety lapses leading up to the explosion to its grossly ineffectual cleanup operation afterward. Among those onboard the Deepwater Horizon were chief mechanic Douglas Harold Brown, who delivers harrowing testimony about the night of the explosion (illustrated in quick, impressionistic blips of footage); he and fellow survivor Stephen Stone poignantly speak out about their sense of guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder. The family of Gordon Jones, a drilling fluids engineer killed in the blast, express their anguish as well as their anger at BP for its lack of contrition or accountability, a $20 billion trust fund set aside to settle claims arising from the oil spill notwithstanding. Kenneth Feinberg, the attorney chosen to administer the fund, is the closest figure to BP interviewed here; although the film doesn’t delve too deeply into the controversial matter of his compensation (by BP) or his denials of numerous claims, his tone-deaf reference to the settlement as a “gift” to locals speaks for itself. But Brown’s inherent interest in complexity leads her beyond mere finger pointing; she subtly reveals how the entire capitalist machinery of oil production and consumption is entrenched in American life in general, and Southern life in particular. The filmmaker brings her camera and crew to Bayou La Batre, the seafood capital of Alabama, where the decimated oyster population has cost countless workers their jobs and homes. One local hero is Roosevelt Harris, a food-pantry volunteer who encourages others in the community to file claims for the money they deserve; their unwillingness to do so speaks to a collective sense of fear, skepticism and helplessness, as well as class and cultural barriers that impede any sort of meaningful engagement or discussion.
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