Shut Up & Sing (***1/4)

? Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (partnering with Cecilia Peck) chronicles country-music superstars the Dixie Chicks as they deal with the fallout from lead singer Natalie Maines’s famously controversial remark. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Maines had told a London audience that they were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” The result back home was protests, criticism, lost sales and airplay, and even a death threat. For the group and its publicist and manager, there was confusion about how to handle the negative publicity. Alternating between footage dating from the 2003 tour and from the 2005–2006 period in which the group’s follow-up album was recorded and promoted, the film shows the attempts of the trio, which also includes sisters Marty McGuire and Emily Robison, to move forward in terms of both sound and marketing.

+ The behind-the-scenes footage displays the group’s contradictory impulses toward damage control and anger (combined with wonder) at the firestorm an offhand comment has created. Some of the most revealing scenes only indirectly have to do with the controversy, such as an exchange where their new producer, Rick Rubin, is telling Maines to rewrite the lyrics but keep the melody of a tune she’s not too sure is any good. Using the rock-oriented Rubin, who’d also helped market Johnny Cash to a new audience, is part of a part-forced, part-voluntary attempt to move away from their former core audience. Maines is definitely the most colorful personality and a funny presence.

- I’m not sure I liked the switching back and forth between the 2005 and 2003. I’d have to assume that Kopple didn’t decide to make the documentary the moment the remark was made and had to rely on existing footage for the earlier period. Perhaps the switching helped deemphasize that a documentary ostensibly about a 2003 incident was mostly shot two years later. This isn’t a huge flaw, but I’d have liked to see more about the process by which the band or Maines decided to issue what now seems to be a calculated (and now disavowed) apology for disrespecting the president. There are also very few voices outside of the band. It’s probable that a rock or rap artist would not have generated the same level of rage as a country band, and it would have been useful to delve further into the nature of the country music audience and its definition of patriotism.

= ***1/4 As any documentary about a music group, it helps to be a fan (although there aren’t any complete musical numbers), but this has enough general interest to be worth a look if you were curious about the whole hullabaloo when it occurred. For those looking for a lot of conflict, it’s not here. This is the opposite kind of documentary as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which focused on a band at war with itself. If this movie is accurate, whatever effect the anti-Bush remark had on the Chicks’ fan base caused no real dissension in the band’s camp.

IMDb link