William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Movie Details
Title: William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Running Time: 85 Minutes
Status: Released
Country: United States
Genre: Documentary, Biopic
“Bill” Kunstler was the flamboyant, contentious, proudly revolutionary lawyer for the Chicago Eight, a handsome man with an unruly mane of black-and-white that was as impressive and iconic as the head of hair on Susan Sontag. What’s it like being the young daughters of this John Brown–like presence?
And later on, how do they feel when their King Lear dad seems to have lost his mind and his way, shifting from defending civil-rights and anti-war cases to becoming the mouthpiece for defiant criminals like the 9/11 terrorists and the Mafia’s John Gotti? This is an impressive documentary, both a telling family document (Emily Kunstler directed, Sarah Kunstler produced) and a deserving tribute to the man who, on his best days, stood up for the prisoners in Attica and the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee and marched with Martin Luther King.
Review Summary
For William Kunstler, the wild-haired, radical civil rights lawyer with the raspy voice who became a left-wing political star in the late 1960s, Michelangelo’s statue of David symbolized how he saw himself. A photograph of the statue that morphs into a drawing of David twirling his slingshot is a recurrent image in the crisply made, largely admiring documentary “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.” To him, it embodied the moment everyone faces at some time or other when one has to stand up to injustice or keep silent. A refresher course on the history of American left-wing politics in the 1960s and ’70s as well as an affectionate personal biography of Kunstler, “Disturbing the Universe” was directed by Sarah and Emily Kunstler, his two daughters from his second marriage. Although the film, with its home movies and family reminiscences, portrays him as a heroic crusader for justice, it is by no means a hagiography of a man who earned widespread contempt late in his career for defending pariahs. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times
