John Lennon's peace activism has never cut such an impressive figure as it does The U.S. vs. John Lennon, produced by the same team as Fahrenheit 911. The style is almost like a History Channel special, mixing archival footage with commentaries by a remarkable cast of characters including presidential candidate George McGovern, Nixon chief operative G. Gordon Liddy, Walter Conkrite and Noam Chomsky, the movie is very enjoyable to watch because of the long sequences of unadulterated stock footage. The film portrays the overly excessive political pressure to drive John Lennon out of the U.S. because the Nixon administration viewed him as a national threat. But what makes this movie so much more interesting than anything you've ever seen before about John Lennon is probably just the sheer amount of footage, of him as a person, exchanging ideas, and thinking, which is very different than just watching a concert film.
The movie starts with a short bit about his childhood and Lennon's strained relationship with his parents, who basically abandoned him. There's an interview in which Lennon remarks that he was always getting into trouble as a kid and in his teens, and in a great boomerang one-liner at the end of the film, when Lennon is seen walking into the court house for his deportation trial, he says it feels like he's "in trouble in school again. I'm going to see the head."
Most of the film comprises Lennon's later Beatles years and his first years as a solo artist, when he became very interested in publicly speaking out for peace. Lennon is seen with activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the head of the Black Panthers Bobby Seale. These affiliations led the Nixon administration to fear him. There are very few concert clips in the film, and almost none with the Beatles. Most of the footage is from Lennon and Yoko Ono's sit-ins, press conferences, and interviews. The footage is truly incredible because you can see Lennon exchanging ideas and you can experience his exceptional wit as well as his naiveté in full force. Sometimes this naiveté is almost shocking sometimes as when Lennon is asked what Nixon should do in order to improve the situation in Vietnam and he replies, "He should declare peace." His wit, though, is dead on.
The film does a great job of getting the viewer to feel the tumultuous time of the 1960s. The many clips of marches and speeches really give you the feel how violent the 1960s were, both physically and intellectually. Lennon was at the forefront of this intellectual violence for peace. There is a great remark in the film that nobody in the administration was afraid of Mick Jagger, but they were afraid of Lennon because there was some sort of intellectual force behind the things he was saying. In a recent post on IMDB.com one person commented, "I think it's very important for kids in our generation to see John Lennon and how he stood up against the government in a way that no one seems to be doing now. We are currently seeing the re-Hooverization of America." This is a very levelheaded point. Even though the situation nowadays is substantially different than the situation America was in during the Vietnam era, both internally and externally, the power and freshness of Lennon's intellectual approach toward the administration and its war in Vietnam is something that has no parallel today. One sour note of the movie is its ending with a comment by Gore Vidal that threatens to turn the whole movie into an anti-Bush metaphor. Vidal says inventively, "John Lennon and everything he did stood for life, while Nixon," and the after a moments pause, "and Bush ... stand for death". While the comment itself is Vidal's personal opinion and does not seem completely extraneous to the movie, the directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld made a crucial mistake by having it as the closing remark of the film.
Overall, though, the movie was exceptional and everyone should be encouraged to go see it. With Lennon's humor and wit, and especially his extraordinary conscience, to lead us through this movie it ends up being very entertaining. It should be noted that it could have been very easy for the directors to play up the conspiracy theory elements of the story of Lennon's harassment by the FBI, but rather it seems as if they just let the clips and the former Nixon administration officials speak for themselves and distances themselves from any crackpot theories. This movie is very important to our generation for the parallels in the youth of today's concern (at least our supposed concern) with peace, and it is interesting to note how fresh most of Lennon's views appear in today's environment. It makes you wonder why we have no one who seems to be expressing peace as simply, and honestly. Lennon was not Bono meeting with world leaders and organizing mass concerts for Africa. Lennon was just Lennon speaking his mind, and he would do the occasional benefit concert if asked, but his views were firm and unyielding and they were very much his own.
