The past is a different country, said LP Hartley, but the 70s era of first world revolutionary outrage looks like a different planet, or maybe a different solar system. Robert Stone's lively but ultimately frustrating documentary takes us back to this era, and to one of its biggest and most enduring mysteries: the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, who became the poster girl, not for radical consciousness, but the more banal Stockholm Syndrome in which abductees come to identify with their captors.
Stone takes us through the long hangover of Nixon's second term, with flower-power idealism curdling into violence and resentment. A mysterious group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (the name was never explained at the time, nor in this film) snatched rich girl Patty Hearst and enjoyed spectacular successes controlling the media with their extravagant ransom demands - an ironic triumph that Patty's press-magnate grandfather might grudgingly have conceded from beyond the grave. Then Patty became a convinced revolutionary herself, earning the nom de guerre Tania and participating in bank jobs. She was eventually arrested and decades later the post-9/11 crackdown mopped up a lot of her unpunished comrades, but Patty enjoyed pardons from Presidents Carter and Clinton.
What was happening in her head? Was there an initial "brainwashing" period before she saw the revolutionary light? Or was it all just a Stockholm phenomenon? Does she have a sympathy with modern anti-corporate activism? We never know. The single interview with Patty is from a British TV talk show with Gaby Roslin, and it is superciliously cut off after one line. A disappointingly unrevealing film.