It's hard to imagine a year as completely insane as 1968.
The sheer number of colossal national tragedies and violent episodes at home and abroad during that year is just staggering. It started with the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive in a war that was already killing a thousand Americans per month, with an expanded draft that was nearly impossible to avoid. The My Lai Massacre happens two months later. Demonstrators against the war were being beaten, shot and killed. Incumbent President Lyndon Johnson realized it was probable he'd lose the election based on the unpopularity of the war, so he actually removed himself from contention for a second term. Martin Luther King was murdered, causing riots nationwide in direct opposition to the message he lived to preach. The most promising Democratic candidate for president, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated two months later. In August, Richard Nixon was nominated by the Republicans as their candidate for president, draft cards were being burned and the nation's generation gap was exploding, and there were only three television networks to choose from - no massive glut of 24-hour pundit-puke diluting and damaging the national discourse.
To even approximate that mood of the nation in the modern era, one would have to imagine what the world would be like if both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were assassinated within months of each other, Bush had instituted the draft to force anyone of college age to go fight in Iraq back in 2006, the Panthers of Islam were fighting against discrimination and John McCain was a scandal-scarred "peace with honor" war crusader... wait, that last part is true. (Anyone remember the Keating Five?)
And then came the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which brought the struggle for the nation's soul into sharp focus and eventually resulted in the kangaroo courtroom saga that is the basis for Chicago 10, a unique take on the documentary form that sets animation, celebrity voices and a modern soundtrack to re-enact the transcripts of the trial that so clearly delineated the struggle between the new minds and the old way.
Writer/director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays In The Picture), desperate to evade the trappings of talking heads and narration that are standard for the documentary, lets the footage do the narration and the animation charge the story of the eight activists and two lawyers who found themselves subject to an antagonistic judge and a belligerent prosecution (likely no coincidence that the prosecutor is drawn to resemble President Bush and voiced by master of belligerence Nick Nolte).
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were charismatic young people leading a movement called The Yippies, which was a more radical active take on the Hippie philosophy. David Dellinger ran an organization called MOBE: the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden were a part of SDS - Students for a Democratic Society. Together, they encouraged thousands upon thousands of antiwar activists to converge on Chicago, run by Mayor Richard Daley with an iron fist, and send a message to Lyndon Johnson's party that the war needed to end immediately. And converge they did, resulting in days of anger and nights of abuse and beatings at the hands of riot cops deployed in massive numbers to keep these strange people in line. The culmination was an attempt at a march en masse on the convention center itself that led to tensions erupting and an all-out club and gas attack on the protesters on national television.
Then, eight of the demonstrators were put on trial for attempting to incite a riot, including Bobby Seale of the Black Panther party, who was barely in town long enough to give a speech and was railroaded more severely than the rest of the bunch. Daley needed someone to blame.
Chicago 10 turns the trial into a very strange episode of Metalocalypse, and given that animation style I was half-expecting a group of shadowy evil men of power plotting against the Chicago 10 like they were Dethklok, or Hoffman stabbing the prosecutor with a jagged guitar and washing away in the gusher of blood. But I digress. Once you get going, Chicago 10 really comes alive as a piece of work that should hopefully drive home the relevance of these events to younger people who have no real concept of organized resistance.
Hank Azaria's Abbie Hoffman is just as passionate and comical as the real thing, and I could scarcely tell the difference between the voices during the trial and on the archival footage, as is his gift. Mark Ruffalo's belligerent Rubin, Liev Schreiber's remarkably calm and collected defense attorney Willian Kunstler and Dylan Baker's serene Dellinger all work perfectly in the context of the trial. The real climax of it all is the dramatic contest of wills between Seale (Jeffrey Wright) and the elderly Judge Julius Hoffman (the late Roy Scheider) that is so outlandish that one can scarcely believe it actually happened. Judge Hoffman was so blatantly biased against the defense that he actually chained and gagged Seale because he wouldn't stop insisting on his constitutional right to represent himself, and the stark parallel to the actual events of the Chicago riots is driven home with a startling clarity.
Chicago 10 is an interesting, involving and different educational effort, and it's radical enough that you can't help but think the defendants would all be proud to see it portrayed this way.
