Days of Rage

CHICAGO 10
Running Time 103 minutes
Written and directed by Brett Morgen
Starring Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Mark Ruffalo

Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, from his own screenplay, turns out to be a difficult film to define, evaluate or even describe. Much of it consists of rotoscoping, and much of it is made up of old newsreel material from that fateful year, 1968. I am more than old enough to remember the year and the period vividly. As executive producer Ricky Strauss says in the production notes: “Chicago 10 tells a story that is relevant any time, but its number one aim is to use the gutsy, idealistic youth of 1968 to inspire the youth of 2007. Chicago 10 offers a unique opportunity to shine a light on the importance of political activism and to show a new generation the power of participating in democracy.” Executive producer William Pohlad adds: “Brett is young enough to not have lived through the actual events but still has that radical spirit that both serves the story and makes it accessible for younger people who may not be aware of this part of history.” All right, I get it. Chicago 10 is not made primarily, or even at all, for old geezers like me, who remember all too well the events of 1968, having approached my 40th birthday that year, a singular year for assassinations (the Rev. Martin Luther King, Senator Robert F. Kennedy) and riots—in Chicago and a hundred other American cities; at Columbia University in New York, just when I was getting ready to teach there for the first time. We won’t talk about the French student and worker strikes later that year that toppled Charles De Gaulle from power. It was a year like 1848 that settled nothing, but hardly a year like 1793, when King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded. One might say that after all that 1968 furor, Lyndon Johnson was figuratively beheaded, but all we got in his place was Richard Nixon, who continued our involvement in Vietnam another six years, until 1975.

Hank Azaria provides the voices of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsburg; Dylan Baker, of David Dellinger and David Stahl; Nick Nolte, of prosecuting attorney Thomas Foran; Mark Ruffalo, of Jerry Rubin; the late Roy Scheider, of clownish Judge Julius Hoffman; Liev Screiber, of William Kunstler; and Jeffrey Wright ,of the outrageously shackled, manacled, bound and gagged Bobby Seale. Distractingly, the visual figures are not based on the comparatively charismatic features of the actors, but on the real-life likenesses of the participants in this judicial travesty.

The ample newsreel-like footage of the riots is more interesting because many of the participants look really scared, and not defiantly sassy toward authority like the Chicago 10, the Weathermen and the Yippies, whose antics alienated even many of the people who were against the war. If Mr. Morgen and his collaborators and colleagues think this generation of young people are going to rise in revolt like the class of 1968, he and they are overlooking some crucial differences between 1968 and 2008.

First: LBJ had abolished student deferments from the draft in 1966. There is no draft at all in 2008, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future. Second: There was no 9/11 to enrage the Vietnam-era populace, only a trumped up Gulf of Tonkin incident far from our shores. Third: There was a cold war raging in 1968, but there was no oil in Vietnam as there is in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, thereby defining an American vital interest. Most people seem to be against the war in Iraq, but we are even more of a consumer society than we were back then, and most people today in every age group are too worried about the economy to take to the streets to protest even an unpopular war.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt anyone, young or old, to catch up on the fascinating history lesson illustrated and embellished by Mr. Morgen and his crew in Chicago 10. Curiously, back then there were no qualifying tributes to our “brave boys” overseas, as there are today. More common was the abusively rhetorical question of a folk musician to an otherwise inoffensive young man in uniform in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975): “Kill any children lately?”