Turbulent '60s the backdrop for 'Weather Underground'

Friday, October 17, 2003

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

The documentary "The Weather Underground" is a perceptive, fascinating and relatively evenhanded look at the most radical arm of the American student rebellion of the Vietnam era.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND

DIRECTORS: Sam Green and Bill Siegel

DOCUMENTARY

RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes

RATING: Unrated

WHERE: Varsity

GRADE: B+

The group, which took its name from a Bob Dylan lyric ("You don't have to be a weatherman to know which ways the wind blows"), grew out of the non-violent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the turmoil of the late '60s, and quickly took it over.

Unashamedly espousing a pro-violence stance, the faction's leaders went underground after a bomb accidentally killed three of their own people in 1970, and they stayed there through most of the decade, planning and carrying out the occasional protest bombing.

The thrust of the film is generally sympathetic to the Weathermen, starting out with grueling footage of Vietnam atrocities and making the point that the group took great pains to ensure their bombings of establishment buildings never killed any innocent bystanders.

All of the leaders, who surfaced in the late '70s (and served little or no time for their activities), tell their stories to the camera: Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Naomi Joffe, David Gilbert, Laura Whitehorn and Brian Flanigan.

But directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel also interview some of the group's most vocal detractors, including an undercover FBI agent, Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver and Todd Gitlin, an SDS founder who thinks the Weathermen were a bunch of spoiled rich kids who "hijacked" his organization.

The film also establishes the fact that -- because they were young, attractive outlaws-on-the-run right out of the era's definitive movie, "Bonnie and Clyde" -- the Weatherman phenomenon was largely a media contrivance way out of proportion to reality.

At its best, "The Weather Underground" is a cautionary tale of the psychology of terrorism or, indeed, of any fundamentalist righteousness.

As one of the more remorseful of the ex-Weathermen puts it, "If you think you have the moral high ground, you can do some terrible things."