Mike Bonanno, left, and Andy Bichlbaum star in "Yes Men."
By Kirk Honeycutt
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- It's time to establish a category in the burgeoning documentary film movement called the "subversive documentary." Clearly the work of Michael Moore and Errol Morris has pointed the way to these activist films that seek to directly confront perpetrators of injustice and corporate malfeasance in American society with the naked truth of their actions.
Sundance 2004 has given us two more brilliantly subversive films: Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me," in which the filmmaker wolfs down McDonald's dubious food for 30 days, making himself quite ill, and "The Yes Men" by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price.
These three documentarians follow the Yes Men, two merry pranksters-cum-political activists named Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who over several years impersonated officials of the World Trade Organization. They have appeared at conferences and on TV to promote theories and projects that are the reductio ad absurdum of WTO policies to increase corporate profits in the Third World.
The fact that businessmen and lawyers respond to lunatic ideas as being reasonable simply because they believe them to come from WTO representatives demonstrates the key point of the Yes Men: True believers will accept the most heinous arguments and propositions if they are uttered by other true believers.
The result of the filmmakers' four-year journey with the Yes Men -- so named because they basically agree with people, then push their ideas to the point of absurdity -- is a head-shaking, gut-busting subversive film. UA, which distributed the most successful docu in theatrical history, Moore's 'Bowling for Columbine," has another winner here.
The filmmakers record the careful preparations for each appearance. The Yes Men don't take their pranks lightly. Business cards are created, costumes made and speeches rehearsed. When these presentations are made, the effect is that of a "Saturday Night Live" skit where the audience is clueless that they are witnessing scathing satire.
The climax probably comes too early. About midway through, the men attend a textile conference in Finland, where they first argue that American slavery was not so much immoral as cost-inefficient. Then they unveil a gold lame business suit for the international business manager with an inflatable 3-foot phallus that contains a TV monitor on which he might watch over his sweatshop workers around the world.
The only group to revolt is college students, whose b.s. detectors are clearly more acute than those of corporate true believers. The young people get angry when the Yes Men propose to end world hunger by making the poor eat hamburgers made of human waste that can be recycled up to 10 times. (It's been a tough festival for the fast-food industry.)
Yes, "The Yes Men" inspires much laughter, but one leaves the theater in a somber mood. That's when the realization hits that those who rule the corporate world and global trade actually think like this.
THE YES MEN United Artists United Artists and Bluemark Prods. present a Yes Men Films production Credits: Directors/producers/directors of photography: Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, Sarah Price Editor: Dan Ollman Cast: Andy Bichlbaum Mike Bonanno Running time -- 80 minutes No MPAA rating
