I should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floors of silent seas
T.S Eliot
One thing the new documentary, “Downeast,” from the experienced filmmaking pair David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, gets right is the title. For many outsiders, “Downeast,” begins almost anywhere east of Portland on the Maine coast. But to those who live Downeast, it is a point of pride to live in the remote but beautiful parts of the coast where there are few summer people and the economic options are extremely limited if you are not self-employed.
And so our intrepid filmmakers take us on a journey Downeast to Prospect Harbor in Gouldsboro, well beyond the cozy “cottages” (which are actually imposing summer mansions) of Mount Desert Island. Here in this almost unknown part of the coast, a 100 year-old sardine cannery, most recently operated by Bumble Bee Foods, has shut down and put 128 hard-luck employees out of work.
But wait! The American Dream is about to be reenacted here. Into town to save the day comes Antonio Bussone, who wants to buy the plant, invest in state-of-the-art technology to process Maine’s much more commercially valuable lobsters and hire back the town’s unemployed workers. The filmmakers, who have a handful of well-received documentaries to their credit, commit to spending a year in town following wherever this story might take them.
We get to know Bussone, an entrepreneurial Italian who has come to America committed to the values of hard work hard and risk taking that characterize all success stories. Bussone starts in cautiously, but as the story unfolds and he confronts obstacles, he is willing to stake everything he owns on this Downeast gamble. And to add to the set-up for this dramatic story line, Bussone is earnest, articulate (if accented), and handsome and to top it off, an engaging family man, we are given to understand after meeting his attractive wife and kids.
But there is a dark cloud on the horizon. Actually a handful of them and they are the town’s selectmen, who seem to be the only people in the movie who want to rain on Bussone’s parade. The chief dark cloud is Dana Rice, one of Gouldsboro’s selectmen, who it turns out is also a lobster dealer and will be competing to buy the same lobsters Bussone needs to run the plant. Rice seems to be invested in Bussone’s failure. This turns out to be the filmmakers dream: a good guy rides into town and confronts a black-hatted provincial local sheriff interested only in running the good guy out of town and to hell with the town’s people.
The selectmen refuse to approve a $400,000 application for state funds to complete the purchase of the idled plant and the investment in new equipment for lobster processing facility that everyone else can see is a good thing. Although Rice abstains from the vote, he asks, “Why should we subsidize something we are pretty sure is going to be a failure?” Next, many of the townspeople who have been interviewed for jobs with Bussone, including a couple of archetypal Downeast characters with deeply weathered faces and thick accents who have worked at the sardine plant for decades, show up at the annual town meeting to demand an explanation from their elected representatives. The selectmen reverse themselves; the grant request is forwarded to the state, the renovations begin.
That was how the original story was about to end as the filmmakers presented their rough cut to an audience at the Camden International Film Festival a year and a half ago. At the end of the film, as the lights came on, the filmmakers introduced the audience to Antonio Bussone and his wife and kids. They got a standing ovation from the crowd. Success, what could be sweeter or more American?
But life, of course, is not as simple as it is in the movies—even in documentaries, and perhaps especially in documentaries that begin with a moral to the story before it has ended.
What actually happened is that the story took a series of unexpectedly dark turns and to their credit, the filmmakers returned to Gouldsboro to follow it to its unhappy ending. I may have already related too much of this story for those who might want to see the film and make up their own minds, so I won’t go into all the resulting twists and turns. But while Dana Rice’s black hat may not turn fifty shades of gray, he becomes a little less uni-dimensional. In his office, overlooking Prospect Harbor, Rice talks about the herring business and the beautiful double-ended carrier, the Jacob Pike, which he used to own.
He says, knowingly, “There’s a saying that tradition makes a great rudder before it makes an anchor.” When asked why he seems to want Bussone to fail, Rice starts to reply and then falls into a prolonged, pregnant silence. In that silence, you sense, lies a lifetime’s worth of answers the filmmakers cannot penetrate and reminded me of the silence of a pair of claws scuttling across the sea floor.
But there is a larger point to make.
Downeasters, like islanders, tend to be skeptical of outsiders who ride into town with vast notions of what can be changed to benefit them. Downeasters and islanders are provincial; they have an aversion to impulsive risk taking—and for good reason—a lot of risk takers on the ocean end up on the bottom; they do not believe in financial leverage and the wonders of modern credit; they believe in cash and local knowledge and who you are and what your reputation is. These are old-fashioned values, not much suited to the modern world. But whether these values are rudders or anchors, I’ll let you decide. But this movie is provocative and well worth the effort to see.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.