Start the Revolution Without Them

More forgiving minds than mine may see Bret Morgan's documentrary/docudrama Chicago 10 — the opening night film of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival — as a socially-conscious rallying cry for the youth of today. Certainly, that's what the movie, which revisits the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the subsequent trial of the eight "Yippie" activists (including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden) charged with inciting anti-Vietnam riots in the Chicago streets, seems to think it's up to. Morgan wants to stoke the nostalgic fires of the Peace-Love generation while reminding its grandchildren of a time, not so very long ago, when young Americans pro-actively expressed their contempt for an unpopular foreign war. But as with Emilio Estevez's equally simple-minded Bobby, the only people likely to have their eyes opened by Chicago 10 are those who can't fathom the idea that anything important happened in the world before they were born.

Morgan's intentions are unassailable, but Chicago 10 is so stunningly naïve and relentlessly one-sided that I wasn't surprised when two audience members — one who came of age in the '60s, the other a young woman now in her 20s — told me that the movie nearly had them rooting for Chicago mayor Richard Daley and his small army of riot police. For starters, Morgan doesn't offer much background on the Yippies before launching into 100 flashily edited minutes in which vivid newsreel footage of Chicago in '68 is juxtaposed against animated dramatizations of the circus-like courtroom proceedings. (Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte and Mark Ruffalo are among the celebrity voice actors.) And as in his equally hagiographic portrait of movie producer Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture, the director is so in awe of his subjects that he doesn't dare to utter a word of criticism about their motives or actions, even when recapping the rock-star-like fame the protestors achieved in the wake of their arrests ("We're bigger than the Stones," Hoffman exclaims in one bit of archival footage) and the self-serving pranks they frequently pulled in the courtroom by way of showing their contempt for the judicial system. In the world of Chicago 10, everyone with long hair and beards is righteous and good, while everyone else is a fascist pig out to stop the coming revolution. But that revolution never came, Hoffman went underground and Rubin turned yuppie — a series of inconvenient truths that Chicago 10 all too conveniently chooses to ignore.

Before Chicago 10 screened, Robert Redford announced to the sold-out Eccles Center crowd that, in its 24^th year, Sundance no longer needs an introduction — the festival, he said, speaks for itself. Or rather, it speaks for itself with the help of some rather garish buttons bearing the slogan "Focus on Film," which, as festival director Geoff Gilmore (who followed Redford onstage) explained, Sundance staff and filmmakers are being asked to wear this year. For a moment, I wondered what people could possibly expect that a film festival would focus on other than, you know, film. Alas, I suppose there's no point in getting too worked up over a button, especially since, in the pantheon of Sundance's most embarrassing moments, the Focus On Film campaign can't hold a candle to the now-infamous festival trailers of two years ago, in which the word "independent" slowly morphed into the word "inept." But by reducing the festival to a three-word catchphrase you can pin to your jacket, Sundance does the same thing for the world of independent filmmaking that Chicago 10 does for '60s counterculture: It turns a complex movement into disposable pop art.

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