Chicago 10

Last year’s Sundance opening tip, Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, finally arrives at theaters next week via micro-indie distributor Roadside Attractions, providing yet another opportunity to parse the the protests at the Democratic Convention of 1968 and the trial of its organizers (Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, John Froines, Lee Wener, Bobby Seale), and the lawyers who stood in contempt of a contemptuous court to defend them (William Kunstler, Leonard Weinglass).

The trial was a kangaroo court, clearly an instrument of the Nixon administration's fear of the power of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Ultimately, all ten men served jail time of some sort and the antiwar movement was quashed; but the war lasted halfway through the new decade, claiming tens of thousands more American lives and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese.

Yet Morgen’s film has its eyes on the ground, not on the big picture. He wants to immerse the audience in the experience of four days in Chicago when the forces of the American counterculture came into violent conflict with the repressive state apparatus known as the Chicago Police Department. The film consists of half archival footage, half animated pseudo-doc. But while watching it this viewer was overcome by a sense that it really had nothing new to say, no new insight or perspective with which to explore the 60s. Animating these iconic figures and lending them the voices of famous actors is the experiment the entire film hinges on, and it comes off a bit awkwardly. Although the entire cast (Mark Ruffalo, Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Liev Schreiber, and the late Roy Scheider) is terrific, one senses, as the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine blare on the soundtrack, a calculated attempt being made by the filmmakers to make these forty-year-old events seem like violence aimed at the teen demographic. And as the film progresses, offering the barest outlines of the events in American history preceding the organization of the protests, it haphazardly attempts to both provoke boomer nostalgia and contemporary apprehension while harkening to heroes from nineties pop music and motion-capture animation in order to attract the audience.  In the process, it shirks the responsibility to deliver something more comprehensive, ideologically cohesive, and clearly relevant. Morgen’s inability to connect our politically fraught times to the past leaves the whole project with a sense of overwrought miscalculation.

                                                              Brandon Harris