The Bay

**½

Water pollution in the township near a popular tourist bay called Claridge, in Maryland, is documented in Barry Levinson’s “surreality” footage film (found footage, this isn’t, as much as footage used by a reporter during a time of crisis in 2009, brought to light although she realizes it could cause harm to her and her reputation). Boils, lesions, and blisters break out on locals in Claridge, with some nasty results in their deaths. Abdomen and torso “bursts” which look like something just tore chunks out of people seem to be a direct result of polluted water supposedly clean but could have resulted from deposited chicken shit from a nearby poultry manufacturing farm. The town mayor had received reports from two oceanographers regarding parasitic “fluorescent” larvae hatching in fish that had died in the bay but did nothing. An amateur reporter becomes involved in the documenting of the outbreak, getting hold of footage from doctor’s and victims (and a video diary from the oceanographer scientists who were later found dead in the bay).

Levinson has the opportunity to preach from the pulpit regarding man-made horrors that would lead to our ruination. Fertilizers used for the chickens, spilled into the bay through the deposit of the shit, leads to horrifying consequences. We are our own destroyers. Levinson has always been a director with a willingness to speak quite vocally through the characters and their situations in his films. Using the “found footage” format, he can provoke response through how the outbreak is addressed, treated, and overlooked. The mayor focusing on his re-election campaign and economical benefit to his bay, just allowing his town to continue to swim and fish in the bay; this is shown even as he goes on the radio and encourages the listeners to not panic or fall prey to “the rumors”. Even though bodies turn up, and the patients report to the local doctor’s office in staggering numbers, culpability and acknowledgment seem scant and even marginalized.

This really damned creepy once the Fairgrounds festival is over, the doctor’s office full, and locals seemingly gone, yet their despair, agony, and horror can be heard as if in a distant echo reminding us that when we don’t regulate ourselves sufficiently that something quite catastrophic could be lying wait to obliterate us. When the heroine news reporter tries to do a broadcast, the voices away have such an eerie pall that casts itself. Just gave me the willies. The CDC trying to figure out what to do, the panicky public sick in the doctor’s office, the body sores and eventual destruction from inside out, and the reporter stuck in a room using Skype to get the word out. You see a crisis that is temporarily contained but the truth needed to be discovered…someone needed to blow the whistle loudly. A blowhorn needed to be sounded.

While I think the ending is a bit too neatly wrapped up where the parasitical larvae creatures which had developed into crawling aquatic bugs are supposedly killed by chlorine and contained within the city near the bay, I do think there are some powerful scenes where Levinson’s camera through the use of recorded footage showing the dead (one horrifying sequence has a victim with his mouth eaten out moves his eyes!) captures quite a disturbing, unsettling sight to behold. The town’s ravaging thanks to what the chemical steroids in the chicken shit did to the water, giving birth to the creepy crawlies which devour folks inside and out (one gross scene has the things moving within the stomach of one poor guy) is documented in quite a fashion. Levinson certain shows that he wants to shock you. He has a message to, most definitely, about man’s polluting the water we drink and swim and what can happen if careless, total disregard for safely disposing of waste (or possible pollutants of any kind) occurs. 

Not just that but using chemicals to increase population of animals for a food source (chickens in this case) in unnatural ways and how this process could lead to scary consequences. So a lot going on here, but it is quite aggressively told by Levinson, and he is obviously forward in his presentation of how poor we handle crisis situations (the CDC and Homeland Security share a conversation that points towards a severe lack of communication and realization towards just what is really happening in the city by the bay and what could derive from it if matters aren’t handled). 

I can see how this would polarize some while others will wholeheartedly agree with Levinson that this film’s projection of such an ordeal, the “what ifs” of the story, could be more real that we would like to believe. How everything just falls apart, and many innocents (a teenage girl whose family left her uses her phone to convey what is happening around her; a couple and their baby return home on a boat to find their city deserted; views of sick folks puking blood and begging for help while being eaten alive from the inside) are shown infected and frightened can be quite hard to watch. That’s the whole point though: a thriving community destroyed by an outbreak that should never have occurred to start with.