An Unreasonable Man: Critic Reviews

A perceptive and beautifully made documentary portrait of Nader.

The documentary An Unreasonable Man is an admiring but hardly uncritical portrait of Ralph Nader and his 2000 presidential campaign.

Nader haters may not be mollified, but An Unreasonable Man, like its subject itself, is a one-stop civics lesson no one should miss.

What An Unreasonable Man does best is rehabilitate Nader's career prior to the election and remind us of an unparalleled public-interest legacy stretching over four decades.

If the film shows that few men are as unreasonable as Ralph Nader, it also shows that few have so succeeded in shaping their world: His legacy of progressive legislation will affect generations to come.

The film contends admiringly, and convincingly, that Ralph Nader's authentic sense of outrage is the reason he persists when he can't prevail.

Every time a belt gets buckled or an airbag inflates, the movie argues, somebody somewhere has Nader to thank for it.

An Unreasonable Man pays true homage to a man of vehemently held ideas by forcing us to engage our brains at the same high level of consciousness.

The film, directed by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, does a brilliant job of putting his 2000 run for president in context -- to show how consistent it was with everything he has stood for in his remarkable career.

Surely, Ralph Nader deserves better press than he's been getting ever since the 2004 elections -- and the legendary consumer advocate and so-called presidential spoiler receives his due, from both sides, in the documentary An Unreasonable Man.

Though filled with talking heads and clocking in at two full hours, it's thoroughly involving, and its two-part structure explicitly balances Nader's phenomenal career as an anticorporate gadfly in the 60s and 70s with his role in the election of [Bush].

This documentary starts out as a fascinating profile of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, but it ends up getting derailed by a political discussion marked by an abundance of whining.

[The film] finds more than enough absorbing material to hold interest through nearly three-hour runtime.

For liberals, An Unreasonable Man delivers an exciting look back at heady times.

This fascinating documentary examines the issues raised by Nader's runs for the presidency...that shone a powerful light into our grubby political shadows, and also played a part...that twice put George W. Bush into the White House.

If you can detach yourself from the back-and-forth vituperation (perhaps an impossible project), the Nader story begins to resemble a grand tragedy about the American left.

A heroic crusader to some and the spoiler who betrayed the Democratic Party to others, Ralph Nader emerges as a dedicated, controversial and flawed figure.

The compelling documentary An Unreasonable Man carries the tag line, 'Ralph Nader: How do you define a legacy?' but it might just as easily have asked, 'Who gets to define the legacy?'

Compelling Nader docu isn't just for lefties.

...the career of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, in an adoring hagiography...

It can't help but remind us that the man Nader prevented from becoming president has since been more instrumental in the war on environmental pollution than any other public figure. Irony abounds.

Ralph Nader gives and he takes away.

... the not-so-subtle message of the movie is that the unreasonableness that gave us seat belts and clean air also gave us Bush, Iraq and the neo-conservative nightmare.

You may walk away from it still wondering why Nader persisted in running for president in 2004 after being repeatedly begged not to. But, whether or not you admire the decision, the film forces you to admire the determination with which Nader made it.