Toronto Dispatch. 5.

Remember the Right Wing's war against the Dixie Chicks for a comment that their lead singer, Natalie Maines, made in 2003 about being ashamed that George W Bush was from Texas? You'll see much of it again in Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, the documentary by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck about the group and their recovery from a smear campaign.

It wasn't the most delicate of comments, but war isn't the most delicate of topics. Kopple and Peck show the group wrestling with attacks against them, confused about how to respond in public when the media-savvy wolf pack goes after them, confused about the confusion of the sponsor of their world tour, Lipton Tea, whose consultant wonders whether the company wants to be associated with a "brand" like the Dixie Chicks.

The group eventually loses its country audience on country radio, which resolutely won't play their songs. Congress won't listen to critics who say this is a monopolistic reaction, and therefore illegal, although John McCain seems to think so. Who cares about the fine print when you have witches to burn? It takes more than two years, but finally the Chicks have a new recording and a new tour, and a new audience that puts them back on the top of the charts. Maines, who sticks to her guns throughout, is as tough as ever. She's smart, honest, and a crucial example of holding a moral position under fire. The music just keeps getting better, although more topical and autobiographical, as Kopple and Peck show, pairing songs with the events that inspired them. How many groups could do that and have the dignity of not backing down? Their new fans certainly don't mind. The Chicks are a lot less alone than they used to be.

The doc is another example of a film exhuming and addressing a subject that the media have left behind. I'm sure editors will now say, "That's old news." But no book-burning or CD-burning ever is - as we also saw in The US vs. John Lennon. Imagine what would have happened if the Dixie Chicks had brought up Jesus Christ.

This isn't your typical music film. So much ground is covered that few songs are played in their entirety. One thing I would also have liked to have seen from Shut Up and Sing would be interviews with some of the opportunistic politicians and media personalities who piled on and stoked the antipathy toward the Dixie Chicks. Remember, for a while, attacking he Dixie Chicks looked as if it would be as useful a weapon for the Republicans as condemning gay marriage. For those of us who remember the late 1970s and early 1980s, the architect Maya Lin was excoriated in obscene and racist terms for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which turned out to be one of the most stirringly popular sites in Washington, and a great work of art. You'd be shocked to hear what people said about her and her work then. Let's remind the venerable people who attacked her of what they said.

Who came up with the term, "shut up and sing"? We know that the talk show host Laura Ingraham used it for the title of her book, a screed about actors in politics. Ingraham and others fed the fury that turned into disc-burning and a death threat at a concert in Dallas. I can't recall anyone on the Right condemning the threats or the equivalent of book-burning by children. George W Bush certainly enjoyed the witch hunt for a while. The attackers should have been on camera and held to their words now that it's much harder to gang up on critics of a war that most of the public opposes.

Black Book is Paul Verhoeven's melodrama about a Jewish singer's survival during the Nazi occupation of Holland in World War II. To say that this story is dark is a bit like saying war is bad. First Rachel is sheltered where anti-Semitic Dutch peasants feed her every day, begrudgingly, after she recites a verse from the New Testament from memory at the table. After that farmhouse and its fervently religious inhabitants are bombed to bits by a German plane, Rachel connects with the rest of her family on a barge that the Dutch Resistance has told them will cross the border into Allied-controlled Belgium. Once the refugees are out in a wide canal, the Germans appear on a gunboat and slaughter everyone except Rachel, who hides in the marshes. The Nazis loot the dead bodies of jewelry, diamonds and cash. This is all in the first twenty minutes.

This is Verhoeven's first Dutch film in decades. The picture of the Netherlands is anything but flattering. There are few heroes in the dark period that, as everywhere else is Western Europe, is portrayed as a time of heroic resistance to the Nazis. More accurately, survival is shown as what survival usually is, saving oneself by reaching some accommodation with the enemy. The more threatening the circumstances, the more accommodating one's relationship with the Germans tended to be.

Rachel hooks up with the Dutch Resistance and changes her name to Ellis de Vries and her dark hair to blonde. Soon she's at the core of the movement, which sends her undercover when their leader's son is captured to plant a bugging device in Gestapo headquarters. She does so, after initiating an affair with a Gestapo captain, planting the bug underneath a huge framed oil painting of Heinrich Himmler. Holding her nose, she sings at drunken Nazi gatherings in perfect German and dances with the Gestapo brass. There's betrayal after betrayal in the Resistance where militants have a deep mistrust of Jews. Bodies pile up after a botched attempt to free Resistance captives from jail, thanks to someone in the Resistance tipping off the Gestapo. Yet by the end, at the Liberation, turncoats are acting as if they had been patriots, and the Dutch are settling wartime scores among themselves with guns and humiliation fueled by anger and alcohol. A British officer who witnesses some of this frenzy says they're worse than Nazis. It's ugly, but the film is a first-class thriller. Rachel survives with her integrity intact, which may explain why she leaves Holland for Israel.

Verhoeven was the Dutch guy who went to Hollywood many years ago. His films in America had traces of what might be called a European style in a studio container. (Let's not talk about Showgirls. [Oh, but David, a lot of people will want to - dwh]) What he's done now is return to the Netherlands and put some Hollywood style, rare among Dutch directors, in a World War II epic. The infusion works. The acting is extraordinary, especially by Carice van Houten as Rachel and Sebastian Koch (also in The Lives of Others, a German entry at TIFF) as her Nazi lover. So is the script, from what I could tell from the subtitles.

A Dutch acquaintance scolded me for my enthusiasm about Black Book, saying that these stories of wartime collaboration and ambiguous (to put it mildly) morality, all too familiar, are just being warmed over again. They weren't being warmed over for me, or for the audiences in and out of Holland who will welcome Black Book for its intrigue and for its truth-telling about morality bending (all too often willfully) to circumstances.

The public doesn't know these facts too well. It can't, buried as they are by the official self-celebrating versions of history. You could say the same about the Resistance in France or Belgium or anywhere else. Yet bear in mind an important fact: a higher percentage of Jews were deported from Holland than from any Western European country that the Nazis occupied - not a badge of honor. I bet you didn't know that either. There's talk of US distribution of Black Book. Sounds good to me.

Posted by dwhudson at September 13, 2006 9:19 AM