The Irish actor Stuart Townsend is probably best known as the husband of Charlize Theron and the star of 2004′s Head in the Clouds, which starred his wife and Penelope Cruz. But what he really wanted was to direct, and he spent years searching for an appropriate subject for his feature debut. It wasn’t until he read Anita Roddick’s Take It Personally: How To Make Conscious Choices To Change the World (the titular “it” being globalization) that he felt passionate enough to devote several years of his life to write, produce, and direct the film that would become Battle in Seattle.

“It really brought up a lot of important issues that haven’t lost any relevance since,” he recalls. “It was a topic that, visually, really captured me. I didn’t want to give it to anyone else.” By focusing on the mass demonstrations that accompanied the 1999 World Trade Organization conference, Townsend found a way to address these issues without having to resort to an arid tirade. “I felt that I wanted to make an entertaining action movie against a political backdrop. The audience should leave the film feeling inspired and angry.”

Battle in Seattle opens with a mix of documentary footage and scripted exchanges, introducing a  project that so consciously blends fact and fiction. The all-star cast features Woody Harrelson, Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, André Benjamin, Channing Tatum, and Theron playing various protesters, policemen, and bystanders woven together by coincidence and circumstance. Benjamin is a pacifist environmentalist who joins forces with two other anti-globalization demonstrators (Henderson and Rodriguez), in an attempt to shut down the conference. Harrelson and Tatum are police officers charged with stopping them. Much is made of the planning and the protests themselves, but the film is also a love story between Henderson and Rodriguez, demonstrating Townsend’s interest in telling a tale that is “more traditional, more about people.”

This kind of tale is tricky to tell, and, like 2005′s Crash, Battle in Seattle features some unlikely plot points that result in an occasionally contrived storyline. Townsend is much more successful with his urgent protest scenes, shot in a sharp cinéma vérité style, than in trying to tie together the disparate threads of his characters’ lives. And while it’s clear where the director’s sympathies lie, the film is no one-sided polemic; rather, it offers a nuanced perspective that reflects the eighteen months Townsend spent researching globalization from all sides. He cites the distance of time as well as his inability to contact any of the actual protesters for interviews as reasons for the movie’s more balanced voice. One guest at the conference, Dr. Maric (Rade Serbedzija), is a spokesman for Médecins Sans Frontières, present in Seattle to plead the case of AIDS victims in Africa who cannot afford medications because of international patent laws. His presentations are disrupted by the protests, exemplifying what Townsend calls the “gray area where two forces trying to do good come into conflict.” And the progressives fighting global trade can be ugly: anarchist demonstrators break windows, opening a rift in the anti-WTO coalition when the less radical members argue against violence.

Still, in the end, Townsend sticks to his beliefs, making clear that a set of larger global forces, not the police or even the WTO itself, is the source of the conflict: “This is really a set of circumstances that puts profit before people,” he says. “The system is the enemy, not one particular individual.”

Battle in Seattle is in theaters today from Redwood Palms.

Photo by Ed Araquel. Courtesy of Redwood Palms Pictures

KEYWORDS: Activism, Movies, Stuart Townsend