'Battle in Seattle's' Overt Mission

Film About '99 WTO Protests Wears Its Heart, Not Its Art, on Its Sleeve

Ah, good intentions. The road to movie hell is paved with them.

Speaking of hell: My own personal vision of perdition, which is ever-evolving, has always included several nonnegotiable features. Reba McEntire, for instance. Lima beans. And an eternity-long film festival featuring well-intentioned celebrities declaiming their political points of view via lackluster scripts that substitute political significance for convincing drama.

Okay, I made that up. Except the Reba McEntire part. But it's a way of saying that "Battle in Seattle," Stuart Townsend's portrayal of that city's 1999 World Trade Organization protests, suffers greatly -- as do we -- from an overdose of noblesse oblige. Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron, Ray Liotta and Connie Nielsen are among the bigger names involved, and all are inhabiting a world in which people are wellsprings of righteous indignation, as well as oratorical flourish: The media, one protester says -- as the police wade in and start beating people up -- are "turning us into icons of violence." Does anyone but Charlie Rose talk like this?

We hardly need a movie to convince us that corporate greed is killing the world, not this week at least. Had "Battle in Seattle" been a little less obvious -- and more like its very evident influence, Haskell Wexler's 1969 "Medium Cool" -- the timing of the film's release might have seemed like the work of God's publicist.

In "Medium Cool," Wexler wove actual footage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the riots outside into a story about a news photographer's political awakening. Townsend's approach is less oblique: His heroes are the hard-core protesters themselves, organizers such as Jay (Martin Henderson), Lou (Michelle Rodriguez) and Django (André Benjamin), for whom Seattle is just one chapter in an ongoing war against the WTO, an unelected body whose influence on global economics and events is viewed by its detractors as not just antidemocratic, but anti-human. Wrapping Seattle news footage around staged episodes gives "Battle" at least some sense of documentary technique.

Townsend even opens the film with a narrator's summary of the issues involved (as the protesters see them), and it's an ingenious gambit: It relieves him of the expository task of explaining what the WTO is, or why some people would hate it. It's all laid out. Convincingly. Earnestly. And with no pretense of objectivity. Which is okay, because "Battle in Seattle" is agitprop and unashamedly so.

But the movie also presents itself as character-driven drama, and this is false advertising. There are too many characters for us to get a firm grasp on any of them, and little motivation to do so anyway. Jay is the bearded crusader, whose brother died in an earlier protest; Jay's motives are mixed, his police record is long, and his hunkiness is unquestioned. Lou is pugnacious. (Why else would Michelle Rodriguez be cast?) Sam (Jennifer Carpenter) is a law student who doesn't have Django's full-bore commitment to the cause, but because she shrinks from being arrested, she can then work toward getting her friends out of jail. This is after the ineffectual mayor (Ray Liotta) loses control of the situation, the police go berserk, and the governor (Tzi Ma) urges activation of the National Guard.

Townsend runs a two-engined plotline along parallel tracks: We see the protesters under Jay's guidance, planning a disruptive but devotedly nonviolent protest. We see the police, girding their loins and coming off like overcaffeinated robo-cops, planning to get the blankety-blank tree huggers and being portrayed as psychologically and/or professionally ill-equipped to deal with any exercise of free speech, much less one that attracted at least 50,000 people. One particularly belligerent cop is played effectively by Channing Tatum ("Stop-Loss"), but it's his colleague, the seemingly temperate Dale (Harrelson), who starts breaking heads after his pregnant wife (Theron) gets caught up in a crowd, is assaulted by a cop and loses her baby.

Need it be said? The film's message arrives with the subtlety of a police truncheon, and there's little to do from your theater seat but cover your head and hope the rain of dramatic abuse will soon stop.

You don't have to be a political ally of Townsend's to feel a burn of indignation about "Battle in Seattle," but that's the goal of propaganda. He doesn't integrate the staged protests with the real footage particularly well; there are anachronistic glimpses of Seattle's Rem Koolhaas library, for instance, which didn't open till 2004. The acting is fine, but the script is obvious. It's a movie by a true anti-globalizationist, and may win a few converts -- but not among devotees of convincing, capable cinema.

Battle in Seattle (100 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is rated R for language and some violence.