Beyond the Multiplex

"Chicago 10" kicks it off with '60s themes that reverberate today.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Still from "Chicago 10"

Jan. 19, 2007 | PARK CITY, Utah -- An hour or so before arriving at the Sundance Film Festival, I stopped off in Salt Lake City for a burger and got to hear the latter stages of a conversation between a white supremacist and his gay friend. They were talking about tolerance. Then I drove 40 more minutes up into the Wasatch range to this sprawling ski resort, its condos, hotels and McMansions spread out below a frozen sky, to watch an audacious movie about the 1968 Democratic Convention protests in Chicago.

Sundance has essentially become two festivals: One of them is still a treasure hunt for "undiscovered" wonders -- I use the quotation marks because every film in this fest has already, by definition, been discovered by someone -- and the other is a P.R. extravaganza for semimajor pictures already well along the money-slick freeway toward a screen near you. Thankfully, those two streams converged with unusual grace on Thursday night in the world premiere of "Chicago 10," an exhilarating, sure-to-be-controversial film that is like nothing you've ever seen about the '60s before.

Sundance juries have had a distinctly mixed record when it comes to handing out awards ("American Splendor," in 2003, was the last winner of a Grand Jury Prize to make any serious splash afterward), but the festival's programmers do tend to get the party started in fine style. This marks only the second time they've picked a documentary as the opening-night feature (Stacy Peralta's surf pic "Riding Giants" kicked things off in 2004), but "Chicago 10" is no ordinary documentary, and no ordinary anything else either.

How do you create a fresh take on perhaps the most mythologized period of recent American history? In writer-director Brett Morgen's case, the answer is by ignoring or breaking all the rules of documentary film, and by smashing the historical vitrine that has long contained these events and dragging them out into the light. Sure, there's historical footage in "Chicago 10," and lots of it. But I've watched a lot of documentaries about '60s politics without seeing any of this stuff.

During the legendary street confrontations between yippie protesters and increasingly brutal squads of Chicago police, Morgen blends color and black-and-white, switches from TV footage to amateur hand-held cameras and back again, sets the whole thing to more contemporary music. Yes, you heard that right. No Dylan, no CSNY. No "Revolution No. 9," no "Street Fighting Man." Instead, the battles of Lincoln Park and Grant Park are staged to the sounds of Eminem and the Beastie Boys. When you see the MC5 play for the assembled antiwar protesters, they sure sound great -- but that's because the band playing "Kick Out the Jams" on the soundtrack is actually Rage Against the Machine.

No video recordings were made at the infamous Chicago Seven trial, a spectacle of Soviet-scale repression, incompetence and corruption in which Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and four other protest organizers were convicted under a recently cooked up "anti-riot ordinance." (Morgen rebrands it as the "Chicago 10" trial because of the involvement of Black Panther Bobby Seale and lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, who were themselves sent to prison on contempt charges.)

Morgen goes even further here, re-creating long stretches of the trial from the transcript, using Richard Linklater-style motion-capture animation and actors reading the lines. Hank Azaria "plays" Abbie Hoffman, and Mark Ruffalo reads Jerry Rubin. Nick Nolte is the bombastic U.S. attorney, Thomas Foran, and Roy Scheider is Judge Julius Hoffman, who never even pretended to conceal his disgust for the seditious defendants. Living participants were interviewed about their memories of the trial (Weinglass actually reads his own dialogue), but one could argue that this material isn't documentary at all.

Next page: The similarities between 1968 and 2006 are evident