MOVIE REVIEW: An Unreasonable Man - Ralph Nader Becomes the Latest Also-Ran Appearing on Celluloid

By Brian Abrams

Surely only a matter of months will pass before movies devoted to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards – hell, even that Governor of Iowa dude – will slate to hit theaters.

Because, in the past few years, the independent film community has embraced political figures as central subjects for documentary features. Errol Morris’ The Fog of War, his brooding doc on Robert S. McNamara, won him the Oscar in 2004. In the same year, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry garnered all sorts of critical acclaim. Last summer, An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore’s global warming blockbuster) broke the $100 million mark at the box office and ranks as the third highest grossing documentary in history.

The non-fiction poli-biopic is a win-win deal: White House candidates will bend over backwards for such a powerful campaign tool, and filmmakers look awfully cutting edge (regardless of election outcomes) when covering a hot ticket politico.

The latest title to join the club is An Unreasonable Man*, a two-hour meditation on the life and times of Ralph Nader. From his days as an activist/attorney in 1960s Washington (where he was known to many as a “radical nerd”) to the alleged vote-splitting catastrophe he caused the Democrats during the 2000 election, first-time directors Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan take a pretty comprehensive snapshot at the Capitol Hill outsider.

The movie unabashedly gloats over its subject and, had it not been seen in a theater (a limited release opened last weekend and will expand in the coming weeks), the title/content could easily be misconstrued as a really long infomercial for what will be Nader’s fifth presidential bid in 2008.

But, hard sale or not, you can’t help but root for the guy. And not just because he’s as close a candidate as we have to stopping the self-destructive financial drain known as The War on Drugs and an advocate of the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. That’s merely the beginning.

Mantel and Skrovan portray Nader as the American unsung hero of the late Twentieth Century, where he broke ground in Washington by spearheading movements that led to passing national laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Clean Meat Act, and all sorts of safety regulations in the automobile industry.

The humanitarian, who turns 73 this month, has instigated a wealth of reforms that benefit the everyman but chafe the pants (and pocketbooks) of greedy conglomerates and a lobbyist-infested U.S. Congress - pretty badass business for a “radical nerd.”

Admittedly, an hour into the nonstop celebration of the man’s career begins to turn exhausting. On top of the multitude of ass-kissing testimonies and stiff montages of file photos and news clips, the visuals are as bland as a documentary can get: every interview subject is nailed to a chair where they yap and yap and yap.

But just when you want to stretch for legs for another round of popcorn, An Unreasonable Man delves into the controversies surrounding today’s Nader, the figure our media has isolated and Middle America considers just another liberal loony. The Nation magazine columnist Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin, a journalism professor at Columbia University, both offer hefty critiques of Nader’s campaigns.

“He’s deluded,” concludes Alterman, intimating that the independent candidate couldn’t put his ego aside to let Gore take the 2000 election. Nader did pick up 97,000 votes in Florida, well more than Gore needed to take the state away from Dubya.

One political analyst counters the detractors by suggesting that our bought-and-sold two-party system needs another way, and, because of Nader’s growing constituency, the Democrats will eventually be forced to cater to issues concerning the Far Left. That is, the Democratic Party will have to grow a set of balls and soon.

And surely we can expect a slew of new poli-bio documentaries any day now that will argue the balls have been there the whole time.



*The film takes its title from a quote in G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman which reads, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."