Nader aid

A documentary explains the controversial crusader but leaves you wondering if it tells the whole story

Mark Holcomb

Taking its title from a George Bernard Shaw aphorism ("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"), the movie packs a lot of world-adapting into its two-hour running time. The first half chronicles Nader's early life as the son of Lebanese immigrants in Connecticut, where his restaurateur father grilled him and his siblings on current events, and follows his rise from Harvard Law School to his initial gig as a consumer advocate studying car safety for the Senate.

The latter is familiar turf, of course, and An Unreasonable Man covers it via equally familiar stock footage (including several old car commercials) and talking-head interviews with Nader's former and current colleagues. But there's an impressive amount of detail here on his auto-industry-bashing crusade and subsequent book, Unsafe at Any Speed, as well as a neat summary of the botched smear campaign by General Motors that netted Nader a near-half-million-dollar lawsuit settlement. That sum helped bankroll the activist group Nader's Raiders and ultimately paved the way for Ralph's political career, the coverage of which takes up the latter half of the film.

This, as we know, is where things get slippery. After briefly touching on Nader's affiliation with the Carter administration and 1996 presidential run, An Unreasonable Man makes a convincing case that his 2000 campaign barely influenced Al Gore's loss. There's data to back this up, and—in a stab at appearing fair and balanced—clips of vehement anti-Naderites eager to verbally crucify him. It's tough to know, however, what was left on the cutting room floor from interviews with media critic Todd Gitlin, journalist Eric Alterman and others, most of whom come off as unreasonable (to put it mildly) in their own right. It's the movie's weak spot, and raises the suspicion that it was conceived largely as a cinematic Valentine.

What stops it from being just that is Nader himself. His prickly tenacity and exasperating literal-mindedness are impossible to spin or contain, and filmmakers Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan (both of whom, bizarrely, were associated with TV's Everybody Loves Raymond) deserve credit for largely resisting the temptation to do either. They effectively plumb Nader's late-career pariah status as well, particularly with regards to the vicious Democratic Party elite, and intriguingly imply that class and perhaps even ethnicity figure into the ongoing backlash against him. Politics, it seems, is an ugly business even for a candidate whose legacy includes the ubiquity of seatbelts.

That said, An Unreasonable Man makes it plain that in the public mind Nader's biggest deficit may be that he doesn't fit the mold of the swaggering bullshit artist that's been the American ideal since, oh, 1492 or so. His detractors could argue—as the movie doesn't—that he's an expert at bullshitting himself, but the notion that sticking to one's ideals and being self-deluded are the same thing is itself a zeitgeisty variety of bullshit. Suffice it to say that the narrative of Ralph Nader's life fails to live up to one American ideal for certain: With the real 2000 election spoiler still in office, it lacks a happy ending.

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