Shut Up & Sing
Directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck
Review by Ethan Alter

In hindsight, it seems like such an overblown controversy. During a March 2003 concert in London, Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines told the packed audience: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We don't support the war. And we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas." Never mind that far worse things had been said about George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War. Never mind that from her demeanor, it's clear that Maines was making her statement partially in jest. Hell, never mind that Bush isn't technically from Texas. (He was born in Connecticut and attended boarding school on the East Coast even after his family moved to the Lone Star State.) That one off-the-cuff remark still managed to inspire a media firestorm that turned America's number one female band into national pariahs. Suddenly, country music stations were no longer willing to play Dixie Chicks music, and former fans were shown on the nightly news tossing the band's CDs into overflowing garbage bins. In interviews, these same men and women acted as if the band had somehow betrayed an unwritten code of ethics. It's one thing for East Coast liberal types to denounce the President, but country singers are supposed to wrap themselves in the flag, no matter what their private feelings might be.

Three years later, of course, public opinion has turned sharply against Bush and the Iraq War, but the Dixie Chicks are still wrestling with the fallout of Maines' words. Their experiences are chronicled in the new documentary "Shut Up & Sing," which is directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple ("Harlan County USA") and Cecilia Peck. Jumping back and forth between 2003, in the aftermath of the infamous London concert, and 2005, when the Chicks began recording their latest album in Los Angeles, the film paints a compelling portrait of a band in transition. Furious at the way the country music industry hung them out to dry two years ago, Maines is reluctant to even call the new album "country." Meanwhile, her fellow Dixie Chicks Martie Maguire and Emily Robison try to sort out their own feelings about Maines as well as the band's musical future.

"Shut Up & Sing" isn't a particularly deep documentary, but it is a consistently engaging one. Granted almost unlimited access to the band's public and private lives, Kopple and Peck reveal the human beings behind the headlines. The movie also makes some interesting points about the role that the mass media played in blowing the story out of proportion as well as the American public's love/hate relationship with celebrities who speak their mind. Their words might not have been revolutionary, but at least they stood their