Vitriol has been tossed at Ralph Nader since he ran for president in the 2000 election.

At one time, aggrieved consumers sent mountains of mail, a car's troublesome drive shaft and even a questionably cancerous lung to Ralph Nader.

		'An Unreasonable Man' Directors: Henriette Mantel, Steve Skrovan Rating: Not rated, but contains a smattering of adult language. Web site: www.anunreasonableman.com Opens Friday at the Harris Theater, Downtown.

Since being labeled a spoiler in the 2000 election, some voters have been flinging vitriol his way. Along comes a documentary called "An Unreasonable Man" and, while it lets his detractors vent, it's a veritable valentine to the man who has devoted his life to consumer safety and holding politicians' feet to the fire.

The title comes from a George Bernard Shaw quote: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

In the press notes, filmmakers Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan make no secret of where they stand. They are firmly in Nader's camp, although Skrovan acknowledges voting for Vice President Al Gore in 2000. Mantel worked as an office manager for Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law in the late 1970s.

"An Unreasonable Man" is, at its most basic, a series of talking heads and archival stills and footage. It assembles a picture of Nader one puzzle piece at a time, addressing America's short-term memory problem by recalling the days when he championed such causes as auto safety and was pictured on Newsweek in a suit of armor with the headline "Consumer Crusader."

The most interesting material may be about Nader's boyhood in Winsted, Conn., where his parents took their four children to town meetings and made them thrash out problems (lack of parking on the main street, for example) at the dinner table. Losing an argument was no excuse to retreat or run away, one of his two sisters says.

Nader's father Nathra ran a restaurant where a nickel bought a cup of coffee and 10 minutes of political conversation. During a meet-and-greet, his mother Rose vigorously lobbied U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush about the need for additional dams to prevent repeats of the 1955 Connecticut flooding.

To be sure, the squabble over Nader's role in the 2000 presidential race is addressed, although the movie gives time to a Harvard University associate professor who examined Nader's campaign stops between Labor Day and Election Day. He concluded there was no evidence he intended to spoil the election but simply wanted to maximize the vote.

Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, media critic and blogger, delivers a blistering assessment, calling Nader a deluded, psychologically troubled man and "the single most important reason we have the most reactionary president perhaps in the history of the United States."

At 122 minutes and nearly four dozen interviews, "An Unreasonable Man" is a little too long, or perhaps it suffers from the nature of the beast.

Short of Michael Moore-style confrontations or a narrator, the directors are left with trying to build tension or debate in the editing room. This person says one thing, the next says something else, and occasionally news footage or a clip from "Saturday Night Live" or "Real Time With Bill Maher" is tossed in.

Despite that, it's a fascinating portrait of a man who didn't just bemoan the fate of a law school classmate left a paraplegic after a car accident. He did something about it, and the end result is evident today whenever you slide behind the steering wheel.

True, he appears single-minded to the point of obsession and devoid of a personal life, but maybe society needs a few people like that. His eventual obituary may include a reference to Election Day 2000, as Phil Donahue predicts, but this movie proves there is more to Nader than that, and he's not retreating from the battlefield any time soon.

Tomorrow: Look for (and listen to) an interview with Ralph Nader.