The tarradiddle of the 1968 Democratic Convention riots and the trial that followed would seem to have it all, with no want for sexing up. There were riots in the streets (circularize live on TV, regular), youthful heroes with a zest for the theatrical, scowling villains with slight regard for decency, and the sense that the future of America was hanging in the balance. That wasn't enough, though, for director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture), who said that with Chicago 10 he wanted to make a film that "resonates with kids today" by being done "in a language they understand� without talk heads and a teller and all those furnishing." Thus: Rage Against the Machine on the soundtrack and all that sporty animation. The first sign, of course, that somebody will be wholly unable to efficaciously communicate with kids today is when they refer to them as "kids today."
Morgen's conceitedness with Chicago 10 -- commixture archival footage of the riot and its aftermath with alive recreations of the trial -- is not the film's problem. In fact, by break away from the shopworn documentarian's path of narration and flashback, Morgen does opens interesting doors for other filmmakers to trace. But the filmmakers (Morgen's main angel was Vanity Fair editor and periodic political dilettante Graydon Carter) have such a deficiency of trust in their own subject's inherent power that it all ends up more a catch than a bold new direction in non-fiction filmmaking. Medium Cool 2008 it's not.
The gimmickry is most vociferous in the courtroom scenes, where the Yippies are being frog-marched through a howlingly unjust mockery of a tryout. Although the dialogue is taken straight from the transcript, Morgen can't help oneself but ham it up his deal. So prosecuting officer Tom Foran's lines come out in Nick Nolte's frighteningly smothered squawk, spell judge Julius Hoffman (whose ludicrous contempt citations were later tossed out by an appeals court) is voiced as pure malefic villainy by the recent Roy Scheider. The defendants get more than human voicing (Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman, Mark Ruffalo as Jerry Rubin) and as well the opportunity to jambon it up, Yippie-style. The stark life renders everyone in the courtroom equally stiff, but Morgen swoops his photographic camera through the confined blank to lend it a dynamism that initially impresses but eventually distracts. No surprise then that such a surface-oriented film is so interpreted with Hoffman and Rubin's freaking-the-straights antics, a trivial of which goes a very long way. Their clown poses seem fifty-fifty more derisory when placed against the sight of Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright) literally indentured and gagged by Judge Hoffman; a sickening display of thuggish authoritarianism that makes the Yippies' funniness riffs the film is so potty of seem pathetic as a response.
Where Chicago 10 does impress is in the depth of its research. With tV audience accustomed to seeing the Chicago riots in a few banal clips shoehorned into 1960s retrospectives, the looping collages that comply the protestors flooding into Lincoln Park and the eruptions of violence later on will be a revelation of Saint John the Divine. What becomes clear is not merely the protestors' lack of central planning (once collected in Lincoln Park and denied a permit to march, the crowds and their Yippie leaders seem lost) merely how their buoyant optimism faded to terror in the face of the police and National Guard's machine-like conclusion to sweep the metropolis clean. Moments briefly bite with the haunt of incipient fascism: Allen Ginsberg chanting with shaking fear over a loudspeaker, blue-shirted police swarming through the trees with nightsticks flailing. But their power is lost through a mussy editing construction and a strangely abrupt conclusion.
By shearing away the standard documentary props in the interest of non boring those darn kids, Morgen has unfortunately left wing himself with a dilemma: how else to institute the setting for the riots? Assuming that Chicago 10 is targeted at today's politically mindful youth (there's at least two or three out there), and wants to educate them about the American left's radical past, it seems to require on faith that they will have a effective grasp on the national mood, circa 1968. The film gives the barest dash of background on where the Vietnam War was during the time, but whatever unschooled youths (the ones Morgen hopes to lure by acting Eminem's "Mosh" during footage of i march) inquisitive why the liberals were protesting the Democrats will be left out in the stale. Chicago 10 is a photographic film that makes history (literally) into a cartoon.
And bewilder out of his cubic yard, too.
