‘Richland’ Review: A Sensitive Portrait of the American Dream and the Fallout of a Nuclear Legacy

Sheri Linden
·6 min read
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In the town of Richland, Washington, which was created in 1943 as part of a clandestine government program, there’s a street named Proton Lane, the high school football team is called the Bombers, and the school mascot is a mushroom cloud. It’s been decades since the nearby Hanford Nuclear Site was decommissioned, but Richland remains, in many ways, a company town — one that’s explored with openheartedness and piercing insight in Irene Lusztig’s eloquent documentary.

For more than 40 years, the Hanford Site produced weapons-grade plutonium, 14 pounds of which went into “Fat Man,” the bomb the United States detonated over Nagasaki as its final, deadly strike in World War II. In what might be called a sign of overkill, about 70 metric tons of plutonium remained in storage at the sprawling plant when it was shuttered. Today, underground tanks filled with more than 50 million gallons of radioactive waste present an intractable cleanup problem.

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There are many things to say about Hanford, which, through eminent domain, claimed 600 square miles of arid shrub-steppe grassland along the Columbia River, displacing townspeople and separating Indigenous tribes from their ancestral home. Many of those things have been said over the decades, in exposés and devastating reports. Turning her focus to Richland, which was built to house the families of Hanford employees, director-producer-editor Lusztig has crafted a quietly stirring composite portrait, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of a complicated legacy.

Hanford and its company town were part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, which Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, opening in a few weeks, will examine from the perspective of the nuclear program’s hotshots, its lead scientists and political power players. Richland is concerned not with upper management but with the people who grew up in the burg’s idyllic midcentury sheen of middle-class advancement.

Many of their fathers, performing good-paying jobs in “the area,” as the complex of riverside reactors was euphemistically known, died young from cancers linked to radiation exposure. The health of people who lived downwind of the facility was also affected. One section of a local cemetery is filled with the graves of infants. For several unhurried, unflinching breaths, cinematographer Helki Frantzen fills the frame with a few of the stone markers from the ’40s and ’50s, one after another, their achingly brief epitaphs commemorating lives that lasted a few months, days or hours.

Rather than laying out a factoid chronology, Lusztig, with strong, clear-eyed work by Frantzen, captures Richland’s gestalt, interweaving a potent selection of new interviews, archival footage, music and song. A key element of the doc is poetry from the 2012 book Plume by Kathleen Flenniken, who grew up in Richland, her father a Hanford chemist. In comfortable settings, four of her poems are read onscreen by Richland natives who share the memories they evoke. In one case, the woman reading “To Carolyn’s Father” is Carolyn herself. “I think I trusted the wrong people,” her loyal Hanford employee dad told her before he died at 59.

The work was so secret at first that many of those clocking in at Hanford didn’t know its exact nature. If they were apprised of its dangers, it was only glancingly, with implied promises that they were somehow shielded. In chilling vintage footage, a worker preparing to enter what’s presumably a higher-risk section is clad in protective gear that looks like thick cellophane. The film’s most horrifying imagery reveals radioactivity experiments on farm animals.

One woman recalls the weekly metal box left on the porch for her father: a urine-test kit. It was just part of life in a tranquil model town that happened to be on the cutting edge of a superpower’s nuclear arsenal. The human capacity to compartmentalize is at the heart of Richland. It’s the ability to focus on the decent living a job offers, and not the life-threatening perils it presents or the weapons of mass destruction that are its product — to embrace, or at least accept, the concept of peace through war. A genial former Hanford janitor who’s now a food truck proprietor says he sees the bomb that shattered Nagasaki as neither good nor bad, but necessary for preserving the United States.

Instead of closing after the war, as was planned, Hanford dug in and grew as a Cold War mentality gripped the nation. Memorialized in one of Flenniken’s poems and in striking archival footage, President Kennedy’s visit to Hanford took place on a sunny September day, just weeks before his murder, to mark the groundbreaking of the site’s ninth reactor, which would be its last. Its first — the world’s first plutonium-producing reactor — is now part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and offers tours, one of which is glimpsed in Richland.

In its final section, the film moves more directly toward art and the yearning for symbolic gestures of reconciliation and acknowledgment of grief. In addition to the poetry, there’s the emotional intensity of a choral performance of a work called Nuclear Dreams (the libretto is by Nancy Welliver, who worked at Hanford for much of her life, with music by Reginald Unterseher). And there’s the ethereal, haunting beauty of a piece by Hiroshima-born visual artist Yukiyo Kawano, a third-generation survivor of the atomic bomb.

Haunting in different ways, Linda Allen’s 1989 song “Termination Winds” is heard twice in the film, memorably. A man in a diner delivers an off-the-cuff a cappella version that accentuates hometown love and fortitude in the face of scrubland adversity, and two women, with banjo and guitar on the dusty road near the Hanford Site, imbue the number with the lilting pang of a protest song.

In that diner, in people’s homes, at Atomic Frontier Days parades and in Richland’s serene riverfront park, Lusztig engages with a wide range of residents. Many express local pride. Only a few speak of loss and pain, among them a Wanapum elder. He describes the Army’s promise to his grandfather that they could return to their territory when the United States government was done with its project. His extended family gathers in his front yard to talk about their connection to the land. “It’s time for us to go home,” he says. But that home is forever changed.

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation have undertaken a major restoration project, planting native plants in the uncontaminated area around Hanford. It’s on this forward-looking note that the documentary opens. The site’s core section, though, remains permanently unusable. Not unlike the dark side of the Hanford heritage that many people prefer not to address directly, the radioactive sludge is there, not far beneath the surface. With curiosity and care, Richland peers into the heart of a small town, acknowledges the joys, and brings the pain and loss and broken promises into the light.

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