It’s fitting that Chicago 10, a Roadside Attractions release, is opening February 29. It’s a weird, once-every-four-years day, and Chicago 10 is a weird, out-of-time movie. Here we have a 40th-anniversary commemoration/celebration of a Vietnam-era carnival of civil disobedience targeted at a contemporary audience that has shrugged at every Iraq-themed film put in front of it. How what amounts to a lengthy ‘Nam flashback is supposed to get asses off couches and into a movie theater is a puzzle, man.

The director, Brett Morgen, has an idea or two about that. To bring the story of Hollywood rapscallion and lounge lizard Robert Evans to the screen, Morgen’s prior film The Kid Stays in the Picture used cut-out graphics and clever visuals, and to hell with the talking heads. It worked: If you were too tired to pick up Evans’ tome and actually read it, or had purchased the thing but hadn’t gotten it off the shelf, the doc did all the heavy lifting for you, as Evans’ sonorous voice recounted his adventures over all the retro-chic razzmatazz. The Kid Stays in the Picture took the book-on-tape concept and transferred it to film.

With Chicago 10, Morgen and co-producer Graydon Carter extend the experiment, lopping off every device that stinks of traditional documentary. (Carter, whose not having a Vanity Fair Oscar party got almost as much coverage as his having one, wants to define the cutting edge for the form with these pictures.) Voiceover, out. All that place-setting jazz, “It was a time of change in America,” etc., gone, baby, gone. Yes, it’s history, but it’s living history, relevant to our age, so let’s give the Doors and “Smoke on the Water” and whatever else that smacks of its time a rest and rock on with Eminem, Rage Against the Machine, and the Beastie Boys and what the people are listening to today. The actual trial was political theater, so the movie about it must be theater of the real — confrontational, in your face. It must be…animated. (more…)