[3.4]
After all of the awards season noise for THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, I found myself vaguely interested in watching the movie, more for the story than the Aaron Sorkin pepped-up dramatization. So, when I found out about CHICAGO 10, a 2007 documentary about the same events, I immediately went for that film instead. The biggest strength of this doc is its use of archival footage, not just of the days of the Chicago convention beat-downs, but the intimate footage of the seven defendants. When you have such media-savvy and colorful characters, isn’t it far more appealing to watch the real thing? While clownish Jerry Rubin and wildcard Abbie Hoffman are the most memorable, it’s worth seeing how seemingly diverse the anti-war contingent was: young and clean cut, Rennie Davis looks like a typical college Republican, while middle-age David Dellinger in suit and tie appears as straight-up “establishment”. It makes a certain sense that posterity kept Hoffman and Rubin as the faces of the movement (they do project all of the anarchist elements that are the most memorable and most “frightening” to an average viewer). And of course, goofball and would-be-prophet Allen Ginsberg is given particular prominence in the footage, although his role is fairly marginal. But, history lets the loudest come to the fore, and it’s a shame that the more subdued and less-quotable voices get relegated to the sidelines.
This doc is made by Brett Morgen, whose THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE was his breakthrough a few years before this movie (and the only other doc I’ve seen by him– he’s gone on to a lot of success, with COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK and MOONAGE DAYDREAM). Because the thrust of this movie is the actual trial of these men, where only court transcripts exist, Morgen decides to spice up the reading by creating rotoscoped images of the trial. This works… decently. The crude animation has certainly not held up well in the following years, and the artistic licenses he takes in his presentation of the characters (Hoffman making faces in court, the judge squinting with disdain) might be historically accurate, but they come off as uncannily manipulated. Yes, Morgen can make the argument he is portraying the trial as the “circus” that Hoffman described it as, but Morgen does the viewer no favors by cramming the soundtrack full of anachronistic songs of revolution. The angry strains of Black Sabbath, Rage Against the Machine, and Eminem might work to highlight the feelings of the characters if this were a Baz Luhrmann production. But it’s a purported documentary, and listening to lyrics about Bush’s war in Iraq in this context just feels odd. Yes, Morgen is trying to draw parallels between the two wars and time periods, but his efforts come off as forced and almost throwaway. The loose connection isn’t very clear or interesting, and the wall-to-wall music may help the film move along nicely for an antsy mainstream audience, but it just feels overdone. Same with the title: these men are famously known as the Chicago 7 (or 8, when you count Bobby Seale, who was tried alongside of them, until he managed to get his case separated). So why call it CHICAGO 10? When the film ended, I was baffled. I looked it up, and it’s a reference to Hoffman saying that there really were 10 of them, the 8 defendants and their 2 lawyers. Ok, that’s nice, but why wasn’t that at least alluded to in the doc? The ending also feels rather rushed, with the obligatory text-on-screen to tell us about each person’s sentencing and appeal. As fascinating as much of this real-life material is, Morgen’s clever idea of using animation in place of archive doesn’t fully pay off, and when he tries to elicit an emotional response about the Chicago beatings and travesty of justice, it doesn’t quite work. Now I’m curious to see if Sorkin could do more magic with his fictionalization.
burning retina 