Chicago 10. Out tomorrow. (********8/10)
Paramount Home Entertainment is coming out with a movie called Chicago 10 on August 26th. It’s a very strange take on the famous Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at that convention that led to riots, arrests, and a really bizarre trial. Chicago 10 is basically a documentary about that trial, featuring archival footage of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Bobby Seale, and the rest of the people involved with the trial. Interviews with them at the time, footage of Hoffman and David Dellinger at speaking engagements, and of course footage of the demonstrations, the police response, and the riots that took place. What happened after the disturbance in 1968 was that eight people were put on trial for “crossing state lines for the purposes of inciting a riot”. The trial really was a farce, and film maker Brett Morgen wants to accentuate this by creating a cartoon representation of the trial itself.
Which means that between the archival footage and the documentary pieces, we get a re-enactment of the Chicago trial by cartoon characters. They look like the people they represent, they talk like the people they represent, and Morgen has recruited some big names to help voice these characters. Jeffrey Wright, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber and many others participated in this film. Which is impressive, and really adds punch to the courtroom scenes, which are taken directly from the transcripts of the trial itself. A trial which saw the judge order Bobby Seale, the national leader of the Black Panther Party, to be bound and gagged right in the courtroom because of his frequent outbursts. This was an absolutely crazy time in North American history, and this trial really encapsulates what was craziest about it. And this movie provides a really interesting look into that trial.
Interesting, but not as interesting as it should be. This trial and these events in Chicago in the late sixties fascinate me, and I wanted to learn everything I could. And in watching this movie, I learned an awful lot. But the style of the movie and the “artsy” nature of the animated segments don’t really help. It’s better than one of those cheesy “courtroom re-enactment” scenes from other, worse documentaries, and I frankly don’t know what I would have preferred to see in it’s place. But the style of the movie becomes overpowering, and I found myself getting distracted from the actual story by the animation. It isn’t a major fault, because this movie is still impressive and thorough, but it prevents the film from being a great one.