In 'Out of Plain Sight,' a toxic threat off California's coast comes into view

“Forever chemicals” don’t dice — they conscionable regroup. Only alternatively of regrouping successful hell, arsenic that aged Marines saying goes, it’s successful the oceans, wherever specified compounds were dumped for decades.

For years, Times biology newsman and Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia has been covering the bequest of everlastingly chemic DDT, a pesticide erstwhile applied to humans arsenic innocuously arsenic hairspray and yardhose water. In 2020 she broke the communicative that barrels of DDT’s toxic waste, past sent to the water level decades agone by its biggest manufacturer, Montrose, were person to Southern California’s shores than antecedently thought. Her ongoing investigative enactment is present the taxable of a documentary, “Out of Plain Sight,” which Xia co-directed with Daniel Straub. (Full disclosure: It was produced by L.A. Times Studios, an affiliate company.)

The movie is simply a fleet, urgent-sounding dispatch, centering connected Xia herself arsenic an intrepid factfinder roving the affected coastline, dropping successful connected scientists, oceanographers, biologists and wildlife experts arsenic she tries to portion unneurotic the effects of fractional a cardinal barrels of forgotten DDT, banned successful 1972 but inactive having an interaction connected an already fragile ecosystem and the descendants of those exposed to it. Her inspiration, quoted up apical and glimpsed successful archival footage, is Rachel Carson, whose seminal 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” spurred capable nationalist outcry against chemic pesticides to pb to the instauration of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson’s galvanizing alarm was, paradoxically, an absence, seen successful declining vertebrate populations (hence the “silent” of her title). Xia’s clarion call, meanwhile, starts with robot-captured images of leaking barrels connected the water floor. That’s the opening of the sea-to-land nutrient concatenation that starts with DDT-ridden marine life. Microplastics are the existent bete noire and rightly so, but we’re inactive successful the acheronian astir the causal calamity of a past era’s chemic polluting. It’s 1 happening if a institution similar Montrose, present defunct, erstwhile believed nary 1 would announcement their monolithic DDT-waste-dumping operation. It’s another, the movie argues, if we take not to wrestle with the biology ramifications being felt today.

“Out of Plain Sight” strives to beryllium much cinematically live than the modular talking-head-laden documentary. A little past of DDT, from the firm excitement implicit its invention to protesting, is fixed a snazzy split-screen archival montage treatment, sourced from acquisition films, newsreels and interviews but scored to the Zombies’ “I Don’t Want to Know” arsenic a cheeky touch. And each of Xia’s interviews are filmed successful the tract successful a vérité style, a motion to journalism successful action, from UC San Diego labs and mammal rescue operations treating cancer-riven oversea lions to microbiologist David Valentine’s attempts to cod samples from those time-bomb-like barrels of sludge.

Though we request movies that demystify journalism (and Xia is an appealing on-camera correspondent), that facet is little absorbing than the propulsive representation of a dedicated, multi-pronged effort to expose, recognize and hopefully cleanable up a still-viable threat. “Out of Plain Sight” doesn’t request to beryllium earthshaking filmmaking to relay a invaluable ongoing communicative astir a hidden nightmare for each of us. It brings to caput different celebrated saying, conscionable arsenic applicable to DDT’s longevity arsenic the 1 astir the Marines, from William Faulkner: “The past is ne'er dormant — it’s not adjacent past.”