Film Review: Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing @ The Screening Room
Expectations: they accompany you to every film, built around all your preconceptions of its content, style and the reputation. Reviewing a documentary focussed on the country girl-group the Dixie Chicks, I proved to be no exception to the rule. Not a particularly rabid fan of the mainstream country music scene, nor of seemingly self-important, navel-gazing documentaries, my skepticism was great. However, as it turned out, that skepticism was completely unwarranted. Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing is an absorbing and intelligent social commentary that uses the Dixie Chicks as a case study in documenting the state of American society.
Even for those neither familiar with, nor interested in, the Dixie Chicks, this is a great piece of documentary filmmaking.
The film does revolve around the outspoken Dixie Chicks, the biggest-selling female group in history. However, over the past few years, they have come under fire for their political views and been blacklisted from American mainstream country radio. The Dixie Chicks are a close-knit ensemble, and directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck devote many scenes to their overwhelming sense of loyalty and sisterhood.
The film’s plotline emerges after the Dixie Chicks play a London concert on the eve of the Iraq war, where lead singer Natalie Maines claimed that her and the band did not the war and were “ashamed that President Bush is from Texas,” their home state. Kopple and Peck convey
the widespread public discontent with the war by using stock news footage of the London protest marches. Despite having an opinion quite similar to that of the global community, the Dixie Chicks were met with absolute outrage from their Southern U.S. following. A boycott led by freerepublic.com
had them essentially banned from southern radio for the past few years. Though their publicist astutely points out that the band were “sticking their finger in the eye of the customer,” the issue
behind getting Dixie-Chicked— yes, it has become a verb—is one of free speech.
Kopple and Peck’s direction focuses on this issue, elevating Shut Up and Sing to another level of complexity. The question of free speech is the crux of the conflict and, wisely, of the movie as well.
Through the lens of the Dixie Chicks’s experiences, the film examines the anonymity of the web-based public voice compared to the spotlight of traditional media.
It showcases the ignorance and hypocrisy on both sides of America’s ever-widening political binary of
red and blue. This divide crosses over into the music scene with a feud between Maines and country singer Toby Keith, culminating in Maines wearing an “FUTK” T-shirt (a parody of the clothing brand
French Connection’s FCUK shirts) at a concert. There are hilarious, and sometimes hilariously frightening, comments caught on film in response to Maines’ comment, with a horrifying absurdity reminiscent of Borat. A protester outside a concert suggests Maines should be strapped to a missile
and dropped into Baghdad. Wellinformed paragon of reason Bill O’Reilly says the Dixie Chicks just “don’t know what they’re talking about.” Most mind-boggling is a radio personality’s statement that
“Freedom of speech is alright—as long as it’s not in public.” The tension effectively builds in the film’s almost unbelievable third act, as a death threat weighs heavily on the group while they prepare for an arena show in Dallas. The drama unfolds as though scripted. As the Dixie Chicks refuse to recant their political stance, Kopple and Peck interpolate clips of the band writing and recording their single “Not Ready To Make Nice.” An entirely unapologetic description of their career and political situation wrapped in the structure of a standard love-gone-wrong ballad, the song lends a powerfully raw
feel to the finale. The documentary uses literally zero narration. This fly-on-the-wall format hangs the film instead on the words of the Dixie Chicks themselves: their conversations, their arguments, their honest ventings to the camera. One is fully drawn into their fight to retain their right to express themselves—a right that is the backbone of the country they are accused of betraying. Shouldn’t the Dixie Chicks be celebrated by proud Americans, rather than condemned? Shut Up and Sing is
a well-crafted documentary about an all-American band decried for forsaking the same America they believe they’re defending, and a film with potentially wider appeal than its soundtrack.
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