The Trial of the Chicaco 7 (Film Review)
Oct. 23rd, 2020 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOriginally, I hear, was supposed to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and with all respect for Spielberg's superior craftsmanship as a director: I'm glad it wasn't. Sorkin has his own flaws and foibles, - does he ever - , and wasn't able to reign in one particular instinct in the final scene, but the combination of Spielberg + Sorkin very likely would have taken into wholesome reassurance territory where it really would have been no business of being.
As it is, the film presents all of Sorkin's strengths as a scriptwriter, - the witty, memorable dialogue, it flows, aided, google tells me, by several of the most memorable lines actually having been said; it' a genuine ensemble movie, and the characters are passionate about what they're doing/the cause they're pursuing (this by no means is self evident; a great many films based on history make the characters only passionate about their love lives instead). And in a most opportune meeting of subject and current day circumstances, there is a lethal anger going on. (Without, I hasten to add, this coming across as high-handed and/or smug lecturing as is the case with Sorkin at less than his best.) There is also black humor, and one character who made me conclude that what this viewer has been prone to take as satire in both the Chicago-based The Good Wife and The Good Fight re: Chicago judges was clearly hardcore realism.
I must admit here that my beforehand knowledge was limited to: there were riots during the Democrat Convention in Chicago that helped Nixon sell himself as a "law and order" President, and the Orange Menace has been trying the entire year really really hard to use that playbook this year. So most of the trial circumstances and most of the Who Is Who was unknown to me. This turned out not to be a problem, despite the fact Sorkin starts in medias res, introduces the eight who will become 7 mid movie, then jumps forward to new Nixonian Attorney General John Mitchell (of whom every Watergate scandal afficiniado immediately thinks "but where's Haldermann?) deciding to indict the eight for a conspiracy to incite violence across state lines (despite the fact that, as attorney Schultz points out, several of them barely knowing each other), then to the start of the trial and from there with the trial proceeding on the one hand and flashbacks illuminating different aspects of the riots on the other. The script trusts that you'll get it it and will be able to follow, and I was. Of course, it also helps there's a stellar cast assembled, even for the cameos, like Mitchell's one scene early on - he's played by John Doman, veteran of The Wire (and of the other Borgias series, where he played Rodrigo, the Pope himself) - or the two scenes much later by former Johnsonian AG Ramsey Clark, who is played by Michael Keaton.
What also stays with me is, believe it or not, the restraint. By which I mean: Judge Julius Hoffmann (not, as he insists, related to defendant Abie Hoffmann), played by Frank Llangella, is a case study of outrageous bias and abuse of judical power, but we don't have to told. We can see it in action. At first the crusty old uncle-isms appear funny but the laughter soon sticks in your throat, and Llangella is just superb in the rule; while he oozes contempt for all the defendants, he's practically a disgruntled plantation owner towards Black Panther Bobby Seale (it's also a good illustration of how racism doesn't have to use the N-word to make it clear just how much it informs every action). Add the blatant jury tempering and treatment of defense material,and alas, we're not just talking about the Nixon era anymore.
Speaking of the defendants: another thing Sorkin can be good at and is here are complicated dynamics within a group which has been thrown together by circumstance but actually does not have that much in common (beyond being against the Vietnam War). The way Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul Mateen II. in a viscerally intense performance) - who is refused either the lawyer he wants to have or the permission to represent himself, and mainly is among the defendants at all because Mitchell wanted the Black Panthers tied to the riots - is treated differently (and the movie not just being aware of it, but constantly drawing attention to it) is a current day changed awareness of racism that I don't think earlier Sorkin would have displayed (racists in The West Wing being of the Klu Klux Klan type), culminating in the stunning scene when Judge Hoffmann tells the cops "deal with him as he deserves to be dealt with" and has Seale bound and gagged, with the movie allowing extended silence instead of clever remarks to let the full horror of this sink into the audience. The relationship between Abie Hoffmann (Sasha Baron Cohen) and Tom Hayden (Eddie Remayne), too, is something which I feel would have been handled in reverse in earlier times, because Hayden is presented as the kind of establishment rebel believing in change within the system that past Sorkin feels more comfortable with; just think of Josh lecturing Amy in season 4. Whereas Abie Hoffmann has the much more fundamental critique of the US as a society, and the more outrageous tactics. Whereas this time around, the movie after bringing their conflict to a head lets Hayden be the one end up deferring to Hoffmann.
Sorkin style optimism isn't entirely gone: Attorney Schultz is that Sorkin trademark, the decent conservative/Republican who might disagree with our heroes on fundamental issues but also has an ethical code, believes in country/ethics above party and ends up acting on this. He's played by a nearly unrecognizable Joseph Gordon-Levitt and feels like a leftover from the stage when Spielberg was in charge of this project, not least because he's a father with adorable kids. (The other decent establishment figure in the movie is former AG Ramsey Clark who is willing to testify that his department hadn't brought on indictments because they had come to the conclusion the Chicago riots were started by the police, but he's a Democrat.)
However, Schultz doesn't get that much screen time and narrative attention compared to main defense lawyer William Kunstler, who gets played by Mark Rylance and has an arc where he starts out believing in the law and justice prevailing and comes to acknowledge in the course of the trial that something is seriously broken in America, not just one individual corrupt judge.
The final scene, where Sorkin can't resist giving his characters a moral victory at least if they can't have a legal one (as in the trial movie that made his name, A Few Good Men), offers just the type of rousing music in the background which the entire film did without up to this point. Like the character of Schultz, it feels like a Spielbergian outlier inthis movie. (Compare and contrast that most famous of 1970s political movies, All the President's Men, which doesn't end with Woodward and Bernstein victorious but with them defeated, picking themselves up and continuing to work on their story; it trusts the audience will know that Nixon got eventually toppled and is okay with the quiet scene of our reporting duo living to write another day as a conclusion. But then, All the President's Men was made in a different world. The 1970s weren't yet over; Reagan wasn't yet President, Fox News did not exist, and it still was taken for granted that a man who showed himself openly corrupt, contemptuous of any ethical standard, of science and education and with no accomplishments but a series of frauds and a reality tv show to look back on being voted into power was unthinkable. So I don't feel irritated at Sorkin being unable to resist going all Dead Poet Society on us for the final scene.
In conclusion: very much worth watching, imo, though don't blame me if you feel like humming "History Repeating" afterwards.
As it is, the film presents all of Sorkin's strengths as a scriptwriter, - the witty, memorable dialogue, it flows, aided, google tells me, by several of the most memorable lines actually having been said; it' a genuine ensemble movie, and the characters are passionate about what they're doing/the cause they're pursuing (this by no means is self evident; a great many films based on history make the characters only passionate about their love lives instead). And in a most opportune meeting of subject and current day circumstances, there is a lethal anger going on. (Without, I hasten to add, this coming across as high-handed and/or smug lecturing as is the case with Sorkin at less than his best.) There is also black humor, and one character who made me conclude that what this viewer has been prone to take as satire in both the Chicago-based The Good Wife and The Good Fight re: Chicago judges was clearly hardcore realism.
I must admit here that my beforehand knowledge was limited to: there were riots during the Democrat Convention in Chicago that helped Nixon sell himself as a "law and order" President, and the Orange Menace has been trying the entire year really really hard to use that playbook this year. So most of the trial circumstances and most of the Who Is Who was unknown to me. This turned out not to be a problem, despite the fact Sorkin starts in medias res, introduces the eight who will become 7 mid movie, then jumps forward to new Nixonian Attorney General John Mitchell (of whom every Watergate scandal afficiniado immediately thinks "but where's Haldermann?) deciding to indict the eight for a conspiracy to incite violence across state lines (despite the fact that, as attorney Schultz points out, several of them barely knowing each other), then to the start of the trial and from there with the trial proceeding on the one hand and flashbacks illuminating different aspects of the riots on the other. The script trusts that you'll get it it and will be able to follow, and I was. Of course, it also helps there's a stellar cast assembled, even for the cameos, like Mitchell's one scene early on - he's played by John Doman, veteran of The Wire (and of the other Borgias series, where he played Rodrigo, the Pope himself) - or the two scenes much later by former Johnsonian AG Ramsey Clark, who is played by Michael Keaton.
What also stays with me is, believe it or not, the restraint. By which I mean: Judge Julius Hoffmann (not, as he insists, related to defendant Abie Hoffmann), played by Frank Llangella, is a case study of outrageous bias and abuse of judical power, but we don't have to told. We can see it in action. At first the crusty old uncle-isms appear funny but the laughter soon sticks in your throat, and Llangella is just superb in the rule; while he oozes contempt for all the defendants, he's practically a disgruntled plantation owner towards Black Panther Bobby Seale (it's also a good illustration of how racism doesn't have to use the N-word to make it clear just how much it informs every action). Add the blatant jury tempering and treatment of defense material,and alas, we're not just talking about the Nixon era anymore.
Speaking of the defendants: another thing Sorkin can be good at and is here are complicated dynamics within a group which has been thrown together by circumstance but actually does not have that much in common (beyond being against the Vietnam War). The way Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul Mateen II. in a viscerally intense performance) - who is refused either the lawyer he wants to have or the permission to represent himself, and mainly is among the defendants at all because Mitchell wanted the Black Panthers tied to the riots - is treated differently (and the movie not just being aware of it, but constantly drawing attention to it) is a current day changed awareness of racism that I don't think earlier Sorkin would have displayed (racists in The West Wing being of the Klu Klux Klan type), culminating in the stunning scene when Judge Hoffmann tells the cops "deal with him as he deserves to be dealt with" and has Seale bound and gagged, with the movie allowing extended silence instead of clever remarks to let the full horror of this sink into the audience. The relationship between Abie Hoffmann (Sasha Baron Cohen) and Tom Hayden (Eddie Remayne), too, is something which I feel would have been handled in reverse in earlier times, because Hayden is presented as the kind of establishment rebel believing in change within the system that past Sorkin feels more comfortable with; just think of Josh lecturing Amy in season 4. Whereas Abie Hoffmann has the much more fundamental critique of the US as a society, and the more outrageous tactics. Whereas this time around, the movie after bringing their conflict to a head lets Hayden be the one end up deferring to Hoffmann.
Sorkin style optimism isn't entirely gone: Attorney Schultz is that Sorkin trademark, the decent conservative/Republican who might disagree with our heroes on fundamental issues but also has an ethical code, believes in country/ethics above party and ends up acting on this. He's played by a nearly unrecognizable Joseph Gordon-Levitt and feels like a leftover from the stage when Spielberg was in charge of this project, not least because he's a father with adorable kids. (The other decent establishment figure in the movie is former AG Ramsey Clark who is willing to testify that his department hadn't brought on indictments because they had come to the conclusion the Chicago riots were started by the police, but he's a Democrat.)
However, Schultz doesn't get that much screen time and narrative attention compared to main defense lawyer William Kunstler, who gets played by Mark Rylance and has an arc where he starts out believing in the law and justice prevailing and comes to acknowledge in the course of the trial that something is seriously broken in America, not just one individual corrupt judge.
The final scene, where Sorkin can't resist giving his characters a moral victory at least if they can't have a legal one (as in the trial movie that made his name, A Few Good Men), offers just the type of rousing music in the background which the entire film did without up to this point. Like the character of Schultz, it feels like a Spielbergian outlier inthis movie. (Compare and contrast that most famous of 1970s political movies, All the President's Men, which doesn't end with Woodward and Bernstein victorious but with them defeated, picking themselves up and continuing to work on their story; it trusts the audience will know that Nixon got eventually toppled and is okay with the quiet scene of our reporting duo living to write another day as a conclusion. But then, All the President's Men was made in a different world. The 1970s weren't yet over; Reagan wasn't yet President, Fox News did not exist, and it still was taken for granted that a man who showed himself openly corrupt, contemptuous of any ethical standard, of science and education and with no accomplishments but a series of frauds and a reality tv show to look back on being voted into power was unthinkable. So I don't feel irritated at Sorkin being unable to resist going all Dead Poet Society on us for the final scene.
In conclusion: very much worth watching, imo, though don't blame me if you feel like humming "History Repeating" afterwards.
