Battle In Seattle Productions Inc./Ed Araquel
Charlize Theron in "Battle In Seattle."
AUSTIN, Texas -- If you were actually involved with the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999, my guess is you're better off not seeing "Battle in Seattle," Stuart Townsend's lumpy, uneven, undeniably exciting docudrama about those crucial events. Townsend's film premiered at Toronto last fall, and enjoyed a rip-roaring, standing-ovation American debut on Monday night at the South by Southwest Film Festival. (It should reach theaters this fall.) Of course Seattle veterans are a tiny percentage of the movie's potential audience, even if it includes several people I know well, and in general I hold the view that dramatists have a far different mission from reporters and historians, and should be held to different standards.
By weaving the stories of a group of fictional characters around actual news footage, Irish actor-turned-director Townsend clearly hopes to revive the spirit and promise of Seattle '99, which seemed to mark the dawn of a new activist age -- an age that ended suddenly amid the rubble of Sept. 11, 2001. In particular, Townsend wants to convey that the "Teamsters and turtles" street protests more than eight years ago were not wasted energy: They caused at least the temporary implosion of the WTO's global free-trade agenda (he argues), and sparked a debate on trade, development and the environment that has only grown in urgency in subsequent years. (What does it tell us that it takes a foreign-born filmmaker, one who didn't even live in America until 2001, to tackle this story?)