AN UNREASONABLE MAN ssss
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I still remember an argument I got into with a coworker when we were working a promo booth at the Old Town School’s summer musical festival in July 2000. I told her I was voting for Ralph Nader, and she tried to talk me out of it. “Do you really want to wind up casting a vote for George Bush?” she asked. Tipping back in my metal folding chair, I replied, “How much worse could he be than Gore?” I’ve been wrong before.
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Henriette Mantel and Steven Skrovan’s thoroughly involving documentary An Unreasonable Man is guaranteed to restart all those arguments. Though filled with talking heads and clocking in at two full hours, it chronicles a fascinating American life, and its two-part structure explicitly balances Nader’s phenomenal achievements as a public-interest advocate and his controversial runs for the presidency in 2000 and 2004. Pissed-off liberals Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman denounce him as a megalomaniac and traitor to his own cause; longtime friends and associates describe him as reluctant to run for office, driven only by conscience and frustration with the Democratic Party’s sellout to corporate interests. Through it all Nader, as ruefully funny as ever, comments on his adventures. By the end of the movie Mantel and Skrovan manage to put any progressive voter in a bind: if you’re not willing to vote based on real beliefs, why should your representatives be expected to act on them?
An Unreasonable Man is briskly edited, telling Nader’s story through an assortment of incisive personal observations, and that story gathers urgency in the second half, after he agrees to run for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000. Though his “superrallies” drew huge crowds across the country (20,000 people turned out to hear him at Madison Square Garden), Nader was elbowed out of the debates. A student gave him a ticket to watch the first debate inside the grounds of the University of Massachusetts on a remote screen, but the corporate-funded Commission on Presidential Debates had the state police escort him off the premises, a scene captured on video. Gore’s slim margin of defeat in Florida (537 votes) and Nader’s 97,421 votes in the same state have made Nader a pariah in Democratic circles, and the filmmakers couldn’t have found a better pair of attack dogs than Gitlin and Alterman, writers I usually respect. Alterman lays at Nader’s feet all the outrages of the Bush administration–the war, the tax cuts, the assaults on the environment and civil liberties–as if Nader had signed the bills himself.
