CHICAGO 10

Roadside Attractions
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-
Directed by: Brett Morgen
Written By: Brett Morgen
Cast: Voices of Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Live Schreiber, Jeffrey Wright
Screened at: Dolby 28, NYC, January 7, 2008
Opens: February 29, 2008

Victor Hugo (“Les Miserables”) once said, “On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées” (“There’s nothing stronger than an idea whose time has come”). Let’s test that theory with this idea: the American people should rebel strongly at an unpopular war that has been raging for the past five years with no victory in sight. Hmmm. Nothing much is happening, not even on the campuses. The time for rebellion against the Iraq War has not come.

Compare that to what was going on among American youth two score years ago while the Vietnam War ultimately killed fifty thousand of our young men and women and a million plus Vietnamese. Demonstrations everywhere across our land: rebellion was clearly an idea whose time had come. What’s the difference between then and now? May I suggest the one major difference? That would be the draft. As long as college students are not now menaced with involuntary service in the armed forces as they were clearly threatened then, there is no call to arms. (Aside: as for the results of the Vietnam War, the U.S. won, of course. Vietnam today has a thriving stock market, everyone there calls Ho Chi Minh City “Saigon,” the most comfortable footwear in the world, my Rockport ProWalker size ten and one-half wide, is made in that Southeast Asian country, and the Vietnamese Tourism and Convention Center says, “Americans, come back!”)

We’re looking now at Brett Morgen’s film, “Chicago 10.” Once again: If there is nothing stronger than an idea whose time has come, this documentary, which looks more like an exciting work of fiction (that’s a deep compliment), shows viscerally how the unpopular Vietnam War resulted in a powerful blowback. The reaction is symbolized herein by the flagrant derring-do of a handful of outrageous dissenters backed up by tens of thousands of like-minded patriots. If director Brett Morgen were an archeologist ‘round about 1922, he probably would have discovered King Tut’s tomb. He has dug up one heck of an impressive amount of archival film surrounding the police riots of 1968 in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, turbulence that turned the Windy City into a tsunami of violence that made that Midwestern city look like Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

As for why Morgen is releasing the film now (it opened the Sundance Festival in January 2007 and will be released theatrically on February 29 of this year), one can make a shrewd guess that his hope is to light a fire under student butt today to get some serious demonstrations brewing against the five-year war in Iraq. Since Morgen is using some music in his doc composed after 1968—some rock, a little reggae—he is shrewdly adding some contemporary appeal to the film.

There’s quite a lot that’s appealing here, some major imagination on display. For one, thank heavens “Chicago 10” has not the kind of talking heads format that has doomed so many recent Iraq-war pics to box-office purgatory, and so many documentaries in general to full-scale slumber-fests. A second leap of fancy is Morgen’s mixing archival clips with animation, not only a cute gimmick but justified in that the clownish trial scenes have been described as a cartoon. Also, despite a limited budget, the director has rounded up some top talent as the voices of the animated characters as well.

The film runs on two parallel tracts. One involves the massive demonstrations that took place in Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Conventional, an alternate democratic convention if you will, made up of mostly young people, generally dressed more casually than the official delegates who were greeted by the right-wing host to the official convention, Chicago’s Mayor Daley. Yes, that’s the Mayor Daley who in one nasty bit of instructions to the police authorizes the force to “maim and cripple” those who are found looting. The other scenes, which comprise the principal animated segments, are in the courtroom of 78-year-old Judge Julius Hoffman (voice of Roy Scheider), a man still living in the culture of 1950 if not the Neolithic Age. The two principal defendants, charged with inciting the demonstrators to riot, are Abbie Hoffman (voice of Hank Azaria) and Jerry Rubin (voice of Mark Ruffalo), both of whom are given generous segments of archival film as well as cartoon time, both lovable and who, if treated as such by the judge, might have conducted themselves with more grace and humility than demonstrated here.

For that matter, wouldn’t some R-E-S-P-E-C-T of the demonstrators by the L-A-W have turned the entire business into nothing more than a pleasant few days in the park? Why not let the young people sleep in the commons rather than strictly enforce the rules that required the park to close from the house of 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.? (Not shown on this film: Some sociologists have held that class differences between the police and the youth, many of the latter being college students looking upon by the men in blue as privileged, upper-middle-class kids, were the real cause of the over-reaction—the tear-gassing the clubbing, the arrests and bloodshed, but Morgen does not care to clutter the film with talking heads; the correct decision on his part if he wants to capture a youthful audience with the spirit of the times instead of some yada yada yada.)

This film should be required viewing in high school and college today, though it would scarcely be believed as anything more than fiction. Campuses are quiet, the only excitement happening on the football fields and, unfortunately, the very occasional shootouts by the ultra-disturbed. Surprisingly, even people living right in Chicago in 1968 could scarcely understand what was going on. One woman of about fifty is caught on film being kidded by Abbey Hoffman about her views on what’s happening: her only reaction is, “Why don’t you cut your hair?” A black woman of about seventeen is asked whether she has any sympathy for the white guys being beaten by the cops. “No,” she replies, reporting only that they’re getting the same treatment that blacks have been subjected to for a long time—oblivious to what motivates the demonstrators in the first place.