From an outsider's perspective—and through
the mass media's sometimes-mocking lens—Seattle's 1999 protests against
the World Trade Organization's millennial meeting often seemed anarchic and
unfocused, a chaotic mixture of organized civil disobedience and costumed
street rave. In Battle
In Seattle—a
mostly fictional take on real events, patterned after Haskell Wexler's Medium
Cool—actor-turned-director
Stuart Townsend attempts to put faces on the factions and the participants. The best part of the film: While
first-time writer-director Townsend is unabashedly
anti-WTO, he attempts to show all sides of the story. But that's also the worst
part of the film. His kaleidoscopic view is so far-reaching that few of his
characters get enough screen time to make an impact.
The film's nominal focus is passionate organizer Martin Henderson, who has personal as well as political
reasons for going after the WTO; he and jovial, wonky environmentalist André
Benjamin (of OutKast fame) insist on peaceful protest, which sits uncomfortably
with results-driven fellow activist Michelle Rodriguez. On the other side:
Seattle mayor Ray Liotta, who's committed to freedom of assembly, but has to
answer to Washington when "the first Internet protest in history" proves so
well-coordinated that it shuts down the WTO talks entirely. Then there are the
folks unhappily caught in the middle: Woody Harrelson as a cop on the front
lines; Charlize Theron as his pregnant, socially oblivious wife; Connie Nielsen
as a smirking, dismissive TV reporter; and Rade Serbedzija as a Doctors Without
Borders advocate whose plea for AIDS relief goes unheard amid the chaos.
Townsend makes excellent use of 1999 footage and
breathless recreations to give a sense of what it felt like on the ground and
in the halls of power, as agendas conflicted and reactions escalated on both
sides. But the human element is awkward. The size of the cast forced Townsend
to cut corners on character development, such that most of the players seem
preachy, shallow, and shrill. Nielsen's almost instantaneous political
awakening seems particularly forced, and after the complexity of the POVs, the
obligatory post-film call to action seems similarly forced. Still, Townsend
makes an admirable commitment to not portraying the establishment as a bunch of
mustache-twirling overlords or faceless goons, or the protestors as saints. And
it's easy to get caught up in the intensity of his well-staged street battles.
It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering
viewers intensely glad that they weren't.