samdiener Reviews

Battle in Seattle (2007)

Rough Draft of What Should Have Been a Great Film

[6/10 · 17 June 2011]

I just finished watching the Battle in Seattle feature film. I wanted to like it more than I did. I was aware of David Solnit's (one of the Direct Action Network's organizers) concerns about it (see www.yesmagazine.org/issues/purple-America/the-battle-for-reality for a summary, an interview with the director and Solnit at www.democracynow.org/2008/9/18/battle_in_seattle_with_a_list, and a participatory historical website at http://realbattleinseattle.org/), before I started watching.

The film had a great, dramatic, even potentially epic, subject, and a noble idea to tell the story from multiple points of view. I applaud its ambition and I'm glad I saw it. The mini-film essay by Stuart Townsend, labeled "The Making of the Battle of Seattle" (included on the DVD) is actually quite great describing the film Townsend wanted to make. He wanted to make a film fictionalizing and personalizing, through the eyes of multiple characters, the struggles that converged in Seattle during the WTO conference. It's an ambitious goal, and Townsend deserves praise for attempting it.

Unfortunately, however, Townsend didn't succeed in making that movie. There are so many characters that they got lost in the cross-cutting, and remained schematic and two- dimensional. The film doesn't portray the activists either as full-blooded people nor does it at all accurately portray the organizational structures used. It refers to affinity groups a couple of times, but fails to actually show any actually discussing anything.

The scenes outside the jail at the solidarity rallies for those inside come alive, but inside the jail, instead of a hubbub of discussions, debates, singing, and workshops, Townsend repeatedly portrays a group of silent, sullen, defeated arrestees. The exception is Django, an upbeat African-American pro-turtle activist, who gets one of the best moments in the film when, trying to cheer everyone else up, he says that now everyone will know what the WTO is, but then instantly amends that claim to say, "Well, they probably won't know what it is. But they'll know it's something bad."

The attempts at portraying a budding romance between two apparently heterosexual activists is not written well enough to be at all believable. And, to mention just one of potentially many political concerns, there were no gays or lesbians in Seattle protesting?

And we're supposed to believe that a cop whose pregnant lover has just been attacked by a police officer, mistaking her for a protester, and causing her to miscarry, is going to take out his anger by chasing a lone demonstrator (a key organizer, of course), and personally beat him bloody? And then the same police officer is going to enter the jail and apologize for doing it?

There's two ciphers of character who could potentially have been quite fascinating, a Doctors Without Borders activist (who gets one good moment when he asks the trade representatives how they'd feel if their children were the ones who were going to die because they couldn't afford medicines because of the policies they were making) who is trying to pressure the WTO from within, and a trade minister from an un-named African country. But we never see them as anything but cardboard stand-ins for a position, never see them struggling with a decision, and never hear them articulate any kind of point of view about the protests and the impact they are having.

The direction at times was quite good, but I'm not sure it was such a good idea to mix in the real footage because the real footage is so much more dramatic and powerful than the fictional, watching it just made me wish I were watching a documentary instead of a docudrama. Townsend, in his "Making Of" segment, voices the hope that the film will motivate folks to want to learn more. The movie has motivated me to want to watch "This is What Democracy Looks Like" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265871/) and "30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315734/), so at least to that extent, the Battle in Seattle succeeded.

Distant Thunder (1973)

An Amazingly Beautiful Harrowing Film

[10/10 · 14 January 2009]

I'm a big fan of the director Satyajit Ray, who lived up to Renoir's humanist goal of making movies in which "everyone has their reasons." This movie is superb, detailing the dynamics of the war-caused Bengali famine of 1943 through the eyes of villagers, and then forcing the viewer to attempt to multiply the suffering depicted millions of times over in our boggled minds through the cinematic tour de force of a sledgehammer ending. It's marred by an able-ist depiction of one character with a scarred face, which is especially too bad because the scenes in which he appears are the ones in which Ray cinematically draws the connections between male violence in the form of rape and male violence in the form of war planes overhead. I know my review might drive people away from watching a film with this subject matter, and it is wrenching, but the relationships and characters portrayed are believable and even, at times, loving, and the movie is unforgettable and well worth watching.

Breaker Morant (1980)

Best Pacifist War Movie Ever

[10/10 · 23 October 2008]

A superb movie. I'm a pacifist, and I remember talking with a member of ROTC (25 years ago) who also loved the movie. He thought the movie was a brilliant evocation of the horrors of war, and sounded a warning about how the imperatives of war impelled soldiers to commit war crimes. I think that's mostly right, except I think the message is that war itself is a crime, so trying to draw a line between war-fighting and war crimes is almost impossible.

Renoir, the French humanist film-maker, once said that he tried to make movies in which "everyone has their reasons."Beresford in Breaker Morant created an amazingly humanist film, in which even the British generals, who it would have been easy to portray as cartoon villains, are shown rigging the trial of the protagonists in order, in their minds, to prevent a widening of the war.

When watching the film, also look for the illuminating parallels between the British and Australian Boer war in South Africa on the one hand and the US and Australian war against Vietnam on the other.

One complaint. It's been a couple of decades since I saw the film, so I might be hazy on this point, but I don't remember any major black characters. It was set in South Africa, for goodness sakes.

In any case, the movie tells a heartbreaking story, sticks fairly closely to the available facts about the real historical people it portrays, is gorgeously edited, and is beautiful film-making. I think it might be the best pacifist war movie ever made. It's one of my favorite movies, period.

The Home and the World (1984)

A beautiful, morally complex, moving evocation of a woman's dilemmas of love and politics in 1907 India.

[10/10 · 13 September 2002]

The Home and The World is an excellent film by the great Bengali director Satyajit Ray. Based on a novel by Tagore, the drama focuses on the personal and political dilemmas faced by a wealthy Bengali woman in 1907 as her husband and his best friend vie for her affection and her political loyalties.

Very few films successfully focus on the ethical complexities of social movement organizing (The Official Story, Matewan, and Mapantsula are rare exceptions; The Way We Were has some brilliant flashes along these lines, but then veers away from these themes all too quickly). We, the viewers, are initially drawn to the viewpoint of the charismatic political organizer, just as the protagonist is drawn to him and out of the restraints of traditional purdah. Far from painting the husband as a vile monster to revolt against, however, the husband encourages the increasing independence of the protagonist, and becomes the loving conscience of the film, even as it exposes the limitations of his apparent passivity.

As the attraction between the protagonist and the organizer mounts, so does the tempo and the tension of the political struggles in the village. As the protagonist learns more and more about the world beyond the secluded part of her palatial home, we, the viewers, begin to understand more and more the complexity of the cross-cutting tensions between: England and India, modernism and tradition, Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, men and women, leadership and rabble-rousing, means and ends, and love and infatuation.

All this could have been ponderous or didactic, but it's decidedly not, and one of the wonders of the film is that the political issues are woven so deftly into the story of a believable unfolding love triangle. Most movies have a difficult time portraying any motivation for two characters to `fall' in love - this movie manages to portray changes in the relationships between all three main characters with such precision and intensity that I fully believed, and cared deeply, about each one.

The acting is extraordinary, and the cinematography, as is usual in Ray's films, is breathtaking, subtly accentuating the movie's themes of liberation and loss, and the interplay between the two.

Ray said his goal as a director was the same as Renoir's, to show that everyone has their reasons. As perhaps the most warmly compassionate of directors in all of world cinema, he succeeds brilliantly with this film.

Mapantsula (1988)

I believe Mapantsula is one of the best movies about the struggle against oppression ever made.

[10/10 · 16 January 2002]

I believe Mapantsula is one of the best movies about the struggle against oppression ever made (almost up there with Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder, Puenzo's Official Story, and Beresford's Breaker Morant in my book). Like these other films, it beautifully and powerfully focuses on the impact of government violence on the lives of characters who are, at first, unaware of the larger forces which have been shaping their lives.

Mapantsula was ingeniously made under the noses of the South African apartheid censors. The director submitted a script for an innocuous crime-drama, and while the censors were on the set, that is what they filmed. When the censors were not hovering immediately nearby, they filmed the real script - the story of a mapantsula, or thief, who becomes politicized in an apartheid jail. Once they edited the film, they smuggled the finished print out of the country.

The film is at times brutal in its realistic depiction of the physical and psychological tortures employed by the regime of that time. At other times, it is a lyrical and believable evocation of the growing consciousness, and evolving conscience, of the title character, as he encounters more overtly political prisoners in the jail.

I think Mapantsula is far superior to most other anti-apartheid feature films, although I enjoyed (that is to say, I cried through) Menges' A World Apart, and the documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza was superb.