‘Command & Control’ nerve-rattling thriller – ‘Dean’ offbeat comedy

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LOS ANGELES, April 18, (RTRS): The folly of man and the inevitability of disaster are the twin engines powering “Command and Control”, a riveting and dismaying documentary from “Food, Inc”. director Robert Kenner about a 1980 nuclear disaster that took place just outside Little Rock, Ark. Based on the harrowing book by Eric Schlosser (who not only co-wrote, but also appears in the film), this unsettling production — made in concert with PBS’ “American Experience” — is equal parts history lesson, cautionary tale and nerve-rattling thriller, using all manner of nonfiction devices to elicit both horror and outrage over the precariousness of our deadliest arsenals.

Delivering one propulsive bombshell after another, while presenting a chilling vision of mankind’s helplessness to prevent its own destruction, it’s a work whose theatrical potential — kicking off Sept 14 at New York’s Film Forum, then expanding to other cities before its broadcast premiere — would seem to be only slightly less explosive than the nukes with which it’s so concerned.

On Sept 19, 1980, the lethal warhead in question was attached to a musty old Titan II missile buried in an underground silo in Damascus, Ark. — an outdated weapon that, according to then-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, was being kept around largely as a trade-chip for negotiations with the Soviets. It was maintained by a missile combat crew and Propellant Transfer Team (PTS) that used a variety of checklists and security protocols to keep its oxidizer and fuel tanks in perfect balance to avoid a detonation — until the day PTS member Dave Powell’s decision to service the missile’s oxygen tank with a ratchet instead of a torque wrench caused him to drop a socket down to the silo’s floor, where it bounced directly into the side of the Titan II, creating a hole from which fuel began uncontrollably spewing.

Recreations

As Powell states in hindsight, he can still see that socket tumbling out of his grasp, and director Kenner allows us to do likewise, courtesy of expert dramatic recreations that provide an up-close-and-personal snapshot of this and other critical moments, as well as via CGI tours through, and cross-sections of, the Damascus site’s subterranean chambers.

Also utilizing considerable archival materials, “Command and Control” digs into the hour-by-hour specifics of the military response to this incident, which soon involved not only Damascus’ crew and PTS professionals, but commanders in Little Rock, Denver and Louisiana, as well as experts from Sandia Laboratories — the US’s veritable “bomb factory,” where “money was free” and unimaginable weapons were not only imagined, but manufactured on assembly lines.

Even further expanding his material’s scope, Kenner interviews a local farmer who was driving by the scene and radio host Sid King, who arrived at the site once it was clear that a tragedy might be occurring. Those from-the-outside perspectives ably complement the wealth of anecdotes and accounts from the mostly inexperienced team that sprung into action to avert disaster.

As if a potential nuclear explosion — one whose power would be three times that of every bomb dropped in WWII combined — wasn’t terrifying enough, this incident was occurring at precisely the same moment as a political convention just 46 miles away in Little Rock attended by vice-president Walter Mondale, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and democratic senator David Pryor. “Command and Control” lays out its mounting stakes with dramatic precision, allowing the alarming scale of its story to build with each new revelation — including the fact that no one seemed to know exactly what might happen to the nuclear warhead should the Titan II blow.

Familiar as a stand-up performer, a “Daily Show” correspondent, the host of his own Comedy Central show, a musician, a supporting player and a sketch comedian (in that he literally draws sketches), Demetri Martin adds “writer-director” to his resume with “Dean”, which finds his characteristic slightness both a virtue and a liability. Martin stays within his comfort zone as a New York-based illustrator still processing his mother’s death, but the tyro helmer struggles to square his distinct minimalist charm with the second-hand influence of standard-bearers like Woody Allen and Wes Anderson.

An ace supporting cast, led by Kevin Kline, Gillian Jacobs and Mary Steenburgen helps carry his observations on love and grief, but this East Coast/West Coast melan-comedy can’t quite escape the long shadow of “Annie Hall.” Distribution seems certain after this handsome, assured production bows at Tribeca, even if the hope for another “Garden State” phenomenon appears dim.

That said, the film’s Zach Braffian ambitions are apparent from the very first scene, in which the writer-director-star stages a seriocomic exchange in a graveyard while a twee indie-folk song carries into the credits. (“Garden State” had The Shins. “Dean” has the music of Pete Dello and Honeybus.)

Dean (Martin) and his father Robert (Kline) are mourning the death of Dean’s mother, whose passing nearly a year earlier has continued to haunt them both. While his more practical father has tried to move forward by seeing a therapist and putting the family home up for sale, Dean has been spinning his wheels, moping around the city as one deadline after another passes on his latest book of sketches.

Dean heads out to Los Angeles, ostensibly to interview for work at a noxious dot-com outfit, but he’s really seeking a change of scenery. (In a Woody-esque touch, he’s allergic to the almond water they offer him.) He hangs out with his only good L.A. friend, Eric (fellow comedian Rory Scovel), and shortly before his flight back to New York, he connects with Nicky (Gillian Jacobs) at a party and opts to extend his stay indefinitely.

Meanwhile, his father strikes up a relationship of his own with Carol (Mary Steenburgen), the real estate agent who’s putting the family home on the market. In both cases, father and son are eager to start over with appealing new women, but the ache of their loss, along with a slew of other complications, makes it difficult to turn the page.

All told, “Dean” is just the latest addition to the pile of offbeat comedies about arrested development. “He’s an adult now, at least numerically,” Robert laments to Carol when talking about his son, whose sketches have the crude simplicity of a child’s drawing. Martin’s man-child wanderings through the City of Angels makes for some good fish-out-of-water comedy and gives him some separation from Allen’s more advanced neuroses when visiting L.A. in “Annie Hall.”

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