The Plutonium Circus

This is a reprint of the Austin Chronicle review that ran in March when this film premiered in Austin at the SXSW Film Festival. Texas mystique will receive a boost as big as anything since the Dallas heydays if The Plutonium Circus gets the audience it deserves. Ratliff opens his film conventionally enough, with black-and-white graphics giving solemn voice to the history of Pantex, a Department of Energy nuclear weapons plant located in the Texas Panhandle just outside of Amarillo. In fact, much of this 73-minute documentary has a pedestrian look to it: relatively static shots of each subject, with identifying icons filling out the frame. We see the weathered roughneck with an oil derrick pumping away behind him, the demure young couple sitting on a porch swing, the earnest priest haloed by the light of a rose window, the irascible artist in front of the Cadillacs he has embedded in the windswept Texas soil. Rarely have I had so much fun watching people talk. The conventional framing gives a serene, if somewhat surreal, balance to the wonderfully out-of-kilter monologues the interviewees deliver. The controversial decision to store “the deadliest substance known to man” on the outskirts of a city and on top of an environmentally sensitive aquifer (ostensibly the raison d'être for the documentary) takes a twelfth-Cadillac-back seat to the colorful Amarillians voicing their opinions about it. Pantex is merely the ringmaster at this circus, holding the star attractions together but commanding no real audience appeal. Who can concentrate on the issues when an eccentric millionaire is showing you a picture of the 350-pound transvestite he hired to escort him to his high school reunion or when the Pantex PR man/city commissioner/Amarillo booster winks at you during his country-western karaoke performance? Ratliff recognized the real high-flying acts when he saw them and wisely gave them center ring. A mesmerizing tightrope walk between the mundane and the bizarre, The Plutonium Circus deserves a place under the big top.