BATTLE IN SEATTLE
Written & Directed by Stuart Townsend
Produced by Mary L. Aloe, Maxime Rémillard, Kirk Shaw & Townsend
Released by Redwood Palms Pictures
USA. 98 min. Rated R
With André Benjamin, Jennifer Carpenter, Woody Harrelson, Martin Henderson, Joshua Jackson, Ray Liotta, Ivana Milicevic, Connie Nielsen, Michelle Rodriguez, Rade Sherbedzija, Channing Tatum & Charlize Theron
 

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill, campy History Channel re-enactment. Battle for Seattle is a captivating semi-fictional dramatization of the anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations that shook Seattle in 1999. Seamlessly blending archival footage with staged mayhem, director Stuart Townsend documents the event without sacrificing the slick production quality of a feature film.

The events are real, the characters aren’t, but everything feels too brutal and absurd to have truly happened in America. In 1999, a 40,000-strong flood of environmentalists, consumer advocates, labor unions, anarchists, pacifists, and students descended on Seattle to stop the WTO trade negotiations. Some organizations were prepared with intricate choreography for non-violent interference. Others were armed with bricks. In no time, the city’s tolerant approach to what was expected to be a loud but scripted protest was replaced with force, arrests, and violent crowd control.

The brigade of fictional characters—some of them amalgams of real people—spans cops, protesters, politicians, journalists, and bystanders caught in the storm. The film opens on activists Jay (Martin Henderson) and Lou (Michelle Rodriguez) dangling from a crane to unfurl a massive banner high above the city. Immediately, the excitement of the stunt pulls the audience into the film and into their cause. With slightly less fanfare, Django (André Benjamin), an advocate for endangered animals, makes his point by donning a turtle suit and singing Jamaican ditties to lighten the mood.

Regrettably, the dialogue is often uninspired—the style caught somewhere between realistic banter and corny TV drama. Still, Townshend makes an admirable attempt to keep his characters three-dimensional, carefully avoiding bleeding heart martyrs and callous corporate jerks. Ray Liotta plays the conflicted mayor, Woody Harrelson a dedicated cop, but it’s Charlize Theron, as Harrelson’s wife, whose powerful performance elevates the film well beyond it’s documentarian goals.

Battle of Seattle may be a wild ride, but Townsend’s aesthetics (the archival footage is made to look fictional, not the other way around) come with a pitfall. Beyond the activists’ simplistic speeches and heated slogans, we get no real insight into the policies and the history of the WTO. But, perhaps, neither did many of the protesters. After all, rallying tens of thousands of people requires far more excitement than information and, more than anything else, the intoxication of the power to change the world. Yana Litovsky
September 19, 2008