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AN UNREASONABLE MAN
Written & Directed by: Henriette Mantel & Steve Skrovan.
Produced by: Kevin O'Donnell.
Director of Photography: Mark Raker, et al.
Edited by: Alexis Provost.
Music by: Joe Kraemer.
Released by: IFC First Take.
Country of Origin: USA. 122 min. Not Rated.

This engaging overview of Ralph Nader does not successfully deflect the charge of the crusading presidential candidate as the spoiler of the 2000 presidential race, but it does vividly capture the ambitious advocate as not just an outsider, but a stymied and stunned political pariah. Featuring interviews with his staunchest admirers, saddened former allies, and his most severe critics, the filmmakers force the viewer to take sides.

For the first hour, directors Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan succinctly convey Nader’s colorful career as he took on the automobile industry and authored Unsafe at Any Speed. His campaign for higher safety standards led to a hapless smear campaign by General Motors. In congressional hearings, GM admitted that it had hired women to try to seduce him into compromising positions, for which Nader won a $425,000 harassment settlement. The brief family history includes an ironic gem of an anecdote – Nader’s mother button-holding Senator Prescott Bush, the current president’s grandfather, pressuring him to get a dam built after a flood devastated the Naders’ hometown of Winsted, CT.

In the ‘70s, he and his corps of “Nader’s Raiders” pushed the Federal Trade Commission for stronger reformers, and spearheaded such laws as the Clean Air Act, Freedom of Information Act and the Whistleblower Protection Act. For his agenda, and not his private life, he landed on the cover of People and even appeared as a stiff but amiable host of Saturday Night Live. (In a reversal of fortune, both would be unthinkable today.) Yet, it is also revealed he has a history of combining the political and the personal, falling out with a former colleague, Joan Claybrook, when she was part of the Carter Administration. She admits they didn’t speak for about a year.

His string of legislative victories come to a halt upon the arrival of the Reagan Revolution. To compete with rising Republican fortunes, the Democrats court corporate big money at the expense, Nader believes, of the New Deal and the Great Society. So perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Nader ran for the White House first in 1992 and then again in 2000 despite warnings he wasn’t looking at the big picture – by eroding the vote for Al Gore, he would be helping the Republican candidate, the most at odds with Nader’s agenda.

In the post-campaign analysis, there are more justifications than excuses. Nader comes across as bit naïve, amazed to be flatly shut out of the presidential debates in 2000. (Twenty years earlier, he predicted that, “Reagan is going to breed the biggest resurgence in nonpartisan citizen activism in history.”) Fortuitously for the filmmakers, there’s extended and tense footage of Nader being ordered off the premises of the debate by a Massachusetts State Policeman, even though he had a ticket to the event.

There’s the inescapable feeling that Nader wills himself to believe there were not enormous consequences in the election, let alone in the differences between Bush and Gore. He and his defenders accuse the Democrats of being cowed by the Republicans, blindly voting for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq, but nowhere is 9/11 mentioned and how it altered the political landscape. Prior to the terrorist attacks, the Democrats in both houses rarely voted with the Republicans, and it was only a few years ago when Bush’s approval rating was over 80 percent. It’s hard to believe that the 97,488 votes Nader received in Florida in 2000 didn’t have an impact on Bush’s margin of victory of 537. And even Nader’s criticisms of the failing Kerry campaign are not unique. In his new book, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe calls Kerry’s decision to lay off the attack on Bush as one of the “biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics.” Kent Turner
January 31, 2007