Utne Reader Film Reviews: September-October 2008

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The Riot Act
Battle in Seattle
(Redwood Palms Pictures; in theaters)

If activism, like globalism, sometimes becomes unruly, activism about globalism must have real dramatic potential. Hence actor Stuart Townsend’s screenwriting and directing debut, Battle in Seattle, a docudrama about the five days of riots that disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle.

The filmmaker’s sympathies lie with the activists, portrayed by Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, and OutKast’s André Benjamin, whose warmth and dignified charisma make him a scene stealer. Townsend is not skeptical enough to admit that social protest has become a glamour profession, but before you can accuse him of being a part of that problem by stocking his movie with shimmering stars, consider his clever casting against type: Charlize Theron plays a pregnant bourgeois woman who remains aloof from the melee until it literally hits her in the gut; Woody Harrelson is her husband, a riot-busting cop whose rage pushes him over a line and then leaves him wracked with guilt; and Ray Liotta is fictional mayor Jim Tobin (Paul Schell was mayor in 1999), whose faith in free assembly erodes as he sees his city descend into a state of emergency.

Braiding brief snippets of these automatically suspenseful story lines with archival video footage of the actual event, Townsend makes a good point that the thing just got away from all involved. His narrative might seem contrived, but his compassionate stance is not: Battle in Seattle calls for benevolence amid hysteria, which seems like the right way forward into the ongoing morass of globalization. —Jonathan Kiefer

Garbage Warrior
(Open Eye Media; on DVD)
A documentary about architect Michael Reynolds could easily frame his career as a pitched battle between shortsighted regulators and a visionary eco-warrior. Instead, Garbage Warrior unspools at a leisurely pace, weaving together periods in Reynolds’ career as he refines his off-the-grid, sustainable New Mexico dwellings. When the inevitable battle with regulators breaks out, Reynolds is no intransigent iconoclast. He tames his hair, dons a suit, and heads to the state capitol to fight for a law allowing experimental design. “The legal process is OK,” Reynolds concedes, “if you’ve got forever. The problem is, on the planet today, we need fast change.” Invited to tsunami-ravaged South Asia, Reynolds finds that local engineers and homeless villagers welcome his self-sufficient, dignity-restoring dwellings, no zoning questions asked. —Lisa Gulya

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