Battle in Seattle - B (AFI Dallas Film Festival)

Rated R, 100 minutes. At Northpark 7.

The Closing Night screening for this year's AFI Dallas Film Festival was Battle in Seattle, a dramatic retelling of the failed World Trade Organization (WTO) round of negotiations set to take place in Seattle in November 1999. Prior to the start of the screening, Charlize Theron was awarded the AFI Star Award. She was in attendance to accept and attend a loooong Q & A after the film along with her husband, Stuart Townsend (who also wrote, directed, and produced the film) and two of the film's actors, Martin Henderson and Michelle Rodriguez. My expectations for the film couldn't have been lower, and I was pleasantly surprised by it and the Q & A. Below is a picture of the entrance to Northpark, Charlize (white jacket) and Townsend (coat and tie) are in the middle, on the red carpet, just in front of the guy with the bright flash.
Click below for pictures of Charlize, Townsend, Rodriguez, Guillermo Arriaga, and the review of the film.

The opening credits forecast a terrible 100 minutes to come. Though well executed, the description of the WTO and its role in the world was more than a little one-sided (corporations kill!). What followed, however, was a relatively fair depiction of the events that took place that week in Seattle, with a few characters thrown in along the way. Henderson is Jay, the typical smart, bearded, nonviolent protester of all things corporate. He is accompanied in the protest by Rodriguez and Andre Benjamin, both in very generic roles as an angry but confused tough girl and eccentric but dedicated activist, respectively. The aim of the protesters was to stop the talks and bring about change by doing so, I guess. The 'good guy' protesters that were blocking all of the streets 'nonviolently' were undercut by the 'bad guy' protesters that smashed windows and used violence as their path to change.

On the other side are the Mayor of Seattle (Ray Liotta, in a workmanlike performance), the Governor of Washigton and the Seattle Police Department. The Mayor is on top of the situation at first, going over security plans and getting assurances from the Chief of Police that all would be well. Once all hell breaks loose, his weakness and desire to please all sides was his downfall as a state of emergency was declared and the city put on a curfew. Woody Harrelson plays one of the cops on the frontline, a regular guy on the front lines of a global conflict. Charlize is his wife, a typical American with a baby on the way. The actual WTO was not explored except for a few plenary sessions featuring ominous cuts to old white guys in the United States area and some conspiratorial lack of access to translators for an African and emerging nations caucus meeting.

The protester pieces of the film were inconsequential for me. I wasn't interested in their stories, and Townsend chose not to thoroughly explain their motivations for the protest (other than some throwaway references to sea turtles being caught in traps), which furthered my malaise. I found the scenes with the Mayor, Governor and all of the other empires of evil to be interesting, tense and well-paced. I felt for Liotta as he tried to maintain order and respect the rights of the protesters, and the policemen as they tried to do their job while being taunted and rained down upon by piss bottles and who knows what else.

Townsend was smart enough (take notes, Michael Moore) to add in several shades of gray to the film as he showed delegates with the protester's same goals (medical needs over profit) being stymied because of the protests. Charlize loses the baby because she got caught downtown during the mob and accidentally got clubbed by a policeman in a maelstrom. While this was another gray area, Townsend should have used something more benign (like being stepped on or bumped into something) as the reason for the lost baby. This would've been more plausible and more ambiguously placed the blame for the death (I place blame 100% on the protesters). All in all an interesting film that has no commercial viability because of its subject matter.
The Q & A afterward was lively and long. Charlize proved to have an engaging and baudy sense of humor (remarking "Porn" after co-star Martin Henderson said his next project was a "small project in Australia"), and Townsend seemed intelligent and much less militant than I thought he would be. The weirdo in the group was Michelle Rodriguez, who was not on the same wavelength as the others and kept interrupting with unrelated anecdotes that weren't funny. At the end Charlize pointed out that her next project was The Burning Plain with Babel, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Amores Perros writer Guillermo Arriaga in his directorial debut...turns out he was 5 feet from my group in the front row. Arriaga is clearly a genius, but has gotten sideways with the Mexican film gang over credit for certain of his collaboration on films, and is now estranged from his successful collaborator, Alejandro González Iñárritu. Arriaga didn't speak or appear at the festival. My guess is he was in town researching his sophomore directorial effort, the Dallas Buyer's Club, set to star Brad Pitt as a Dallas electrician involved in AIDS drug experimentation and distribution. On the way out we got caught up in the Theron entourage, and Appraiser basically walked out with her, although he failed make any Mr. F references.
Charlize and Arriaga embrace.

Townsend, Theron, Arriaga.

Thanks to my bride for all the lovely photos.