The time was 1968. An unpopular war abroad was splitting the country in two, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s approval ratings at an all-time low. It was in this cloud of uncertainty that the Democratic Party came to Chicago for their national convention, and before a televised audience of 50-million a massive group of protesters decided to crash the party leading to violently shocking consequences which still reverberate even today.

An animated image of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots in Roadside Attractions' Chicago 10

The riots and the subsequent trial of the eight men chosen by the government as the “instigators” of it all is recalled in Brett Morgan’s (The Kid Stays in the Picture) electric and alive documentary Chicago 10. Tracing a moment in American history I admit to not knowing near enough (or really just about anything) about, what struck me as just how deep the parallels to our current situation.

Unpopular war? Check. Unpopular President? Check. Political upheaval? Check. America’s standing in the world greatly diminished? Check, check and checkmate. This isn’t 1968, it’s 2008, and even though the hairstyles may be different and the clothes a bit more ungainly everything being talked about, argued over and intimately discussed as anything going on now.

Mixing simply astonishing archival footage filmed by the news media and other sources throughout the week of the Democratic National Convention and animated rotoscope reenactments of the events chronicled in the transcripts of the trial, the film is both absorbing history lesson and breathlessly entertaining melodrama all rolled into one. Morgan doesn’t beat viewers over the head with needless narration spelling everything out, using instead the words and images of those at the center of the firestorm spoken and composed during the maelstrom to tell its still quite prescient tale.

As for who these men were, I can’t really say I knew too much (if anything) about any of them until watching this. Sure I had heard of Abbie Hoffman, but if you’d asked me why he was so famous or what it was he was supposed to have done in his life all you’d have gotten from me was a clueless blank stare. Same goes for fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin and National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam chairman David Dellinger.

That said, I had heard of Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale, but I had no idea the indignity done to him by U.S. District Court Judge Julius Hoffman, the scenes of a perfectly reasonable Seale asking why his rights are being so cruelly violated as he is bound and gagged in a chair in open court brutally shocking. I also remember a little bit from one of my college political science classes about the group’s lead attorney William Kunstler, but exactly what that is (or was, as the case may be) I really couldn’t tell you.

After watching this I can’t help but want to know more about the whole entire lot of them, including Judge Hoffman, prosecuting attorney Thomas Aquinas Foran and even supposedly “forgotten” defendants John Froines and Lee Weiner. Morgan does a magnificent job of getting the viewer’s feet wet, splashing them with just enough information to make them eager to discover additional information about these people and events.  

A case could be made that the hyperactive heavily Bourne influenced editing style gets a bit much at times, or that the animated segments (voiced by recognizable actors like Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Hank Azaria, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schrieber and the late Roy Scheider) don’t quite mesh with the vintage archive material, or that the modern day music seems a tad jarring and out of context, but these are minor quibbles easily dismissed. Overall Chicago 10 is as dynamite a document of governmental injustice as any I can recall, the truly poignant part being that this injustice is being rewound and relived right this very day.

Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Chicago 10 Theatrical Trailer