Soundtrack of the Day: Brett Morgan's "Chicago 10"

Our compliments to Brett Morgan for choosing a contemporary soundtrack for Chicago 10, a film that opened Sundance 2007 and that is having its first theater releases today. It's about an event the anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the ensuing trial of activists there, but instead of just sticking some Byrds and Buffalo Springfield in the soundtrack for the zillionth time as many other directors would have done, Morgen chose artists like Rage Against the Machine, The Beastie Boys, and Eminem. 

Morgan has said that he "wanted the music to be the soundtrack of my audience's lives, not their parents." It's a choice that helps us see the defendants as the very young men that they were, and also contributed to Sundance audiences' correct assumption that Chicago 10 is very much a comment on the current political climate in the U.S.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I'm such a big fan of directors who use contemporary music for historic subject matter: it's a powerful way to make the material more relevant, immediate. Everything about Morgan's choices for Chicago 10—the revisionist title, the modern music, the unusual animated approach to documentary—suggests that he's unwilling to let his audiences to see the event merely as something that happened forty years ago, and that's a really effective choice.

"Ultimately this movie is really about appropriating this time period and rendering it as something new," Morgen said to Terry Gross in a recent Fresh Air interview. He also explicitly stated that he was appropriating material from the 60's to comment on the current war, and to prompt audience members to ask themselves whether or not they are doing enough to address the issue.

Is it valid, though, for Morgan to use the 1960's to raise questions about whether we're being vocal enough in our objections to the war in Iraq today? I ask because my impression is that as much as young people were protesting the war then, they were protesting the draft and that if the draft were to be reinstated tomorrow, the anti-war demonstrations in this country would be of an entirely different type and frequency.

Still, it's cool that Morgen is asking the question, and he did it in a really outside-the-box way. Cameras weren't allowed into the courtroom at the trial, so he chose motion-caption animation (think Beowulf and The Polar Express) to re-create it, based on audio tapes of the proceedings. The voices were done by Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber, James Urbaniak, and Jeffrey Wright.

The Fresh Air interview with Brett Morgan is available here, by the way. It features clips from the tapes of the trial that Morgan discovered, and was the first time they had ever been played on the air.