Ray Pride

Sam Green and Bill Siegel's "The Weather Underground" is an impressively sturdy documentary about a difficult-to-master slice of American history, a sweet rebuke to the narcissism-as-entertainment wing of contemporary documentary practice. Its politics exist primarily in the choice of subject: a group of young people, dedicated radicals who bombed the U.S. Capitol, among lesser targets. It's thorny work, allowing the viewer to consider the ambitions and failures of the radical group. The feature-length, painstaking chronology, filled with interviews from former members, FBI agents, and adversarial former colleagues, turns out to be more topical in 2003 than the filmmakers could have imagined it would be when they began several years ago, with popular protest rising against a government intent on war. In October 1969, several hundred activists in football helmets, carrying baseball bats and lead pipes, wreaked forty-eight hours of mayhem, starting on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, hoping to prompt a revolution against the Vietnam War and racism. A core group went underground, and battled the U.S. government, notably breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and bombing a range of federal facilities. (It prompted one of the largest FBI manhunts in history, which they evaded for years.) "Weather Underground" is, at least formally, an orthodox documentary, while testing the received wisdom of what is "acceptable discourse" in our land today. These were our terrorists, and the film also chronicles those who didn't make it back to the other side, including David Gilbert, serving a life sentence for his participation in a 1981 Brink's truck holdup. What is most affecting, however, is seeing idealists in their fifties and sixties, who have made peace with their conscience, or have not; who have admitted to failures, or will not; yet carry the witness of experience about their elusive political utopia.

"The Weather Underground" opens Friday at the Music Box. Co-director Bill Siegel appears after Friday's 7:20pm show, with an after-party at Heartland Café featuring Bleary.

(2003-07-30)

Also by Ray Pride

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Fox Searchlight furthers its reputation as the most innovative of arthouse marketers by issuing the first movie with its own DVD extras while still in the movie theaters.
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Short Runs
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Tip of the Week
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