U.S.
Director: Thom Beers
Synopsis: By AARON BARNHART, The Kansas City Star In the opening minutes of “Coal,” the latest drama about dangerous jobs from reality TV king Thom Beers, we follow the guys on the day shift as they head into the Westchester coal mine in southern West Virginia. For a few moments the music and voices fade away, and all you hear is the sound of the motorized transport. You’re one with the men, riding flat on your back in the rear of the sled, the ceiling racing by just a couple of inches above your head. When the transports arrive at the work area, everything goes quiet, and you survey the endless rows of crawl space where these men will spend the next nine hours. It’s a scene designed to show just how dark and treacherous it is way down in the mines, though anyone who saw Barbara Kopple’s classic 1976 documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” already knows that. But while Kopple made a brave film about mine workers fighting for a better life and future for their families, “Coal” is a formulaic, context-free hour about hazardous duty that shuttles the viewer brilliantly from one adrenaline rush to the next. In an interview last fall, Beers said he’d spent three years looking for a coal mine to film. He wanted to focus on a “family business,” he told me, one that was “barely making a living,” like the king crab fisherman of “Deadliest Catch” who he has made into TV stars. Beers found Tom Roberts, a 46-year veteran of the industry, who was hired in early 2010 by Cobalt Coal to restart the Westchester site. “I’ve blown a couple of fortunes in coal,” Roberts says on the show, but that’s misleading because his money isn’t on the line here. In fact, he’s on salary and got a signing bonus of 500,000 shares of stock, according to the website of Cobalt, which is owned by a Canadian energy concern. Cobalt hired Roberts to hire workers and coax 40 loads of coal out of them, every shift, twice a day. That is the drama “Coal” lasers in on. One of the show’s stars is Andy Christian, who runs the continuous miner, a fearsome-looking machine that uses a rotating drum with huge teeth to scrape the coalbed. Christian, says Beers (in his familiar role as narrator), “is the best miner in West Virginia.” A noble-looking soul with soft eyes and a voice that’s barely there, Christian spends the day working a joystick, controlling the beast, making sure it keeps churning out the coal without weakening the roof over the workers’ heads. “He just got the touch,” a co-worker says. Randy Remines, Christian’s counterpart on the night shift, isn’t so gifted with the controls. What’s more, his wife didn’t want him going back underground. “I’ve had three heart attacks,” Remines explains before heading down to do battle, a losing one mostly, with the machine. Men’s lives and livelihoods are on the line, which makes “Coal” a perfect fit for Spike, the cable channel well-known for its ultimate fighting bouts. But “Coal” is so focused on the daily operations at the Westchester mine that it ignores the larger drama facing the area around it, devastated by 150 years of coal mining. McDowell County has seen its population decline from 100,000 in the roaring 1950s, when metallurgical coal production was at its peak, to less than 30,000 today. It has the highest poverty level of any county in West Virginia, and its schools were so decrepit in 2001 that the state took them over. “One of the most busted up, down and out regions of West Virginia,” is how Jeff Goodell, author of “Big Coal” and “How to Cool the Planet,” describes it. And that’s despite the fact that prices for metallurgical coal are skyrocketing (it’s used in steelmaking). Production in the state actually fell 1.3 percent last year. The reserves easiest to extract are long gone. In McDowell County these days, most coal operators don’t even try to dig under mountains. They just blow the tops off. I don’t want to diminish the risks the men take every day they ride down into those mines. They, and their loved ones, will watch this slickly produced show with justifiable pride. But the history of exploitation in this region runs up to the present day, as evidenced by the Upper Big Branch disaster, just an hour’s drive away from Westchester, where 29 miners lost their lives one year ago in a massive methane blast. That site had committed hundreds of safety violations and was run for decades by a ruthless CEO who finally stepped down in December after Goodell exposed his abusive practices in Rolling Stone. Goodell suspects that Cobalt is using “Coal” to promote its investment in Westchester and help its stock price. I suspect he’s right, and unless Andy Christian and his buddies are getting some Cobalt stock for their troubles, that stinks. If “Coal” won’t give you the lay of the land, do yourself a favor and download or rent “Harlan County U.S.A.” That film, which won an Oscar, centered on a nearly yearlong strike in 1973 and 1974 by workers seeking representation from the United Mine Workers. Duke Power sent in thugs, scabs and state troopers to try to break the strike. But the workers prevailed, thanks to their wives — who played a major role in the demonstrations — and a ragtag film crew from New York.
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