Post by Dracula on Oct 31, 2020 13:24:40 GMT -5
The Trial of the Chicago 7(10/25/2020)
I’ve never really been one to demand escapism from my movies. I certainly like escapism when I can get it, but it’s not the only think I want from cinema and when movies avoid escapism altogether and tackle pressing social concerns. But man, the year 2020 is really testing that. Between the pandemic, the social unrest, and the absolute clownshow that national politics has devolved into I’ve become rather unexcited to watch things that are “relevant” enough to remind me about everything in the world that’s been driving me absolutely insane. Aaron Sorkin’s latest film, The Trial of the Chicago 7 potentially looked like the kind of film that ran the risk of being a little too “relevant” for comfort in a way that it wouldn’t in any other years insomuch as it was about protests turning riotous as well as potentially damaging schisms between moderate and radical factions not getting their acts together in the face of tyranny. Beyond that, Aaron Sorkin is always a bit of a iffy proposition; sometimes his brand of slightly corny hopefulness is invigorating but sometimes it’s just irksome and with some potentially loaded material like this I wasn’t sure if this was exactly what I wanted at the moment but it wasn’t like I was just going to skip a major movie like this that’s available right in the comfort of my home thanks to Netflix so I decided to give it a shot.
As the title would imply, this film recounts the case the government under Nixon tried to make against eight defendants accused of crossing state lines to incite violence in relation to the riot that broke out at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Among those charged are the “yippies” Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), the SDS leaders Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), as wells as the MOBE leader David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), and the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). They are being tried by a young federal prosecutor named Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) but defended by (among others) the famous defense attorney Bill Kunstler (Mark Rylance) but will need to contend with a wildly biased judge named Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) who seems to be doing everything in his power to stack the deck against the defendants. The film essentially plays out like a legal drama both in terms of trial scenes as well as trial prep scenes but there are quite a number of flashbacks to the events of the convention riot as well.
This trial and the incident that instigated it has been covered before cinematically. There was a pretty widely seen documentary about the trial called Chicago 10 that came out around 2007 and there was also a TV movie called The Chicago 8 which came out around 2012 which appears to have mostly gone unseen. But the movie that this is most likely to live in the shadow of is not another movie about the incident but Aaron Sorkin’s other famous film which uses legal proceedings as a framing story for a historical event: The Social Network. That film was of course diluted through David Fincher’s icy vision while this is closer to a straight unfiltered bit of Sorkin for better or worse. Sorkin certainly takes the situation he’s depicting seriously at least in theory, but this is still very much a film that indulges in his signature rapid fire dialogue and resultant sense of humor. That’s not to say that the film goes fully into screwball comedy territory but it’s not necessarily a morose bit of political filmmaking you might expect given the unjust situation it’s depicting. Partly that’s a result of certain characters like Abbie Hoffman being rather irreverent figures and partly it’s because of a certain black comedy caused by this judge’s rather absurd bias that’s on display.
The movie is probably at its best when it’s comparing and contrasting the various characters’ different conceptions about how the anti-war movement is supposed to be conducted. If nothing else it’s a pretty good showcase of just how annoying Abbie Hoffman could be and how crazymaking it would be to have him as a co-indictee in a trial given the way he would actively provoke the judge and generally makes everything more difficult. Then there’s David Dellinger, who’s older and more establishment looking than his fellow defendants but is no less radical in his pacifist outlook and then there’s Bobby Seale, who probably shouldn’t have been part of the trial in the first place and tends to respond to authority with a lot more justified paranoia. Finally there are the SDS members Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, who are basically the audience surrogates insomuch as they are of a representative age and background of student activists while lacking in the anachronistic counter-culture of the yippies but they prove to be slightly more complicated figures as the film goes on. Watching it I couldn’t help but equate a lot of this to the similar divisions that exist between the more mainstream factions of the Democratic Party and the more Leftist “Bernie Bro” edge and fill up my Twitter feed with frustrating arguments.
With that in the back of my mind I can’t help but be a little skeptical about how the movie ultimately found itself reconciling these worldviews at a certain point and also felt like it never quite reckoned with the ultimate failures of these activists. The protest at the ’68 convention certainly didn’t help Humphrey or anyone else beat Nixon in the election and the Vietnam war would continue on for seven more long years before ultimately fizzling out for reasons that likely weren’t all that directly related to the counter-culture anti-war movement. Given that I found the moment of rather cheap uplift that the film chose to end on is a bit out of step with where the country was really at in time being depicted. In fact I’d say that ending is also the movie at its worst cinematically as Sorkin really just indulges all his corniest instincts in the last ten minutes or so and Daniel Pemberton’s rather basic score really starts blaring to rather manipulative effect.
Having expressed those issues, I think I’m still going to recommend The Trial of the Chicago 7 without too many reservations. Look, it’s 2020 and we’re starved for real prestige cinema and this thing is filling quite the gap. Sorkin not be the most creative and elegant filmmaker but he remains a writer who can present a story in a fun and accessible way and he’s also assembled a really big and impressive cast and recreates a lot of these events effectively. My worries that it would remind me too much of the world around me in a depressing way were largely unfounded, though under normal circumstances that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Ultimately I think this is a fairly shallow movie about the past which will fit well with boomer self-conceptions but I find it hard to get too grumpy about that in the October of 2020. Definitely a movie worth your time, especially as a Netflix watch, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be returning to it and it could have been much more.
***1/2 out of Five
I’ve never really been one to demand escapism from my movies. I certainly like escapism when I can get it, but it’s not the only think I want from cinema and when movies avoid escapism altogether and tackle pressing social concerns. But man, the year 2020 is really testing that. Between the pandemic, the social unrest, and the absolute clownshow that national politics has devolved into I’ve become rather unexcited to watch things that are “relevant” enough to remind me about everything in the world that’s been driving me absolutely insane. Aaron Sorkin’s latest film, The Trial of the Chicago 7 potentially looked like the kind of film that ran the risk of being a little too “relevant” for comfort in a way that it wouldn’t in any other years insomuch as it was about protests turning riotous as well as potentially damaging schisms between moderate and radical factions not getting their acts together in the face of tyranny. Beyond that, Aaron Sorkin is always a bit of a iffy proposition; sometimes his brand of slightly corny hopefulness is invigorating but sometimes it’s just irksome and with some potentially loaded material like this I wasn’t sure if this was exactly what I wanted at the moment but it wasn’t like I was just going to skip a major movie like this that’s available right in the comfort of my home thanks to Netflix so I decided to give it a shot.
As the title would imply, this film recounts the case the government under Nixon tried to make against eight defendants accused of crossing state lines to incite violence in relation to the riot that broke out at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Among those charged are the “yippies” Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), the SDS leaders Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), as wells as the MOBE leader David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), and the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). They are being tried by a young federal prosecutor named Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) but defended by (among others) the famous defense attorney Bill Kunstler (Mark Rylance) but will need to contend with a wildly biased judge named Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) who seems to be doing everything in his power to stack the deck against the defendants. The film essentially plays out like a legal drama both in terms of trial scenes as well as trial prep scenes but there are quite a number of flashbacks to the events of the convention riot as well.
This trial and the incident that instigated it has been covered before cinematically. There was a pretty widely seen documentary about the trial called Chicago 10 that came out around 2007 and there was also a TV movie called The Chicago 8 which came out around 2012 which appears to have mostly gone unseen. But the movie that this is most likely to live in the shadow of is not another movie about the incident but Aaron Sorkin’s other famous film which uses legal proceedings as a framing story for a historical event: The Social Network. That film was of course diluted through David Fincher’s icy vision while this is closer to a straight unfiltered bit of Sorkin for better or worse. Sorkin certainly takes the situation he’s depicting seriously at least in theory, but this is still very much a film that indulges in his signature rapid fire dialogue and resultant sense of humor. That’s not to say that the film goes fully into screwball comedy territory but it’s not necessarily a morose bit of political filmmaking you might expect given the unjust situation it’s depicting. Partly that’s a result of certain characters like Abbie Hoffman being rather irreverent figures and partly it’s because of a certain black comedy caused by this judge’s rather absurd bias that’s on display.
The movie is probably at its best when it’s comparing and contrasting the various characters’ different conceptions about how the anti-war movement is supposed to be conducted. If nothing else it’s a pretty good showcase of just how annoying Abbie Hoffman could be and how crazymaking it would be to have him as a co-indictee in a trial given the way he would actively provoke the judge and generally makes everything more difficult. Then there’s David Dellinger, who’s older and more establishment looking than his fellow defendants but is no less radical in his pacifist outlook and then there’s Bobby Seale, who probably shouldn’t have been part of the trial in the first place and tends to respond to authority with a lot more justified paranoia. Finally there are the SDS members Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, who are basically the audience surrogates insomuch as they are of a representative age and background of student activists while lacking in the anachronistic counter-culture of the yippies but they prove to be slightly more complicated figures as the film goes on. Watching it I couldn’t help but equate a lot of this to the similar divisions that exist between the more mainstream factions of the Democratic Party and the more Leftist “Bernie Bro” edge and fill up my Twitter feed with frustrating arguments.
With that in the back of my mind I can’t help but be a little skeptical about how the movie ultimately found itself reconciling these worldviews at a certain point and also felt like it never quite reckoned with the ultimate failures of these activists. The protest at the ’68 convention certainly didn’t help Humphrey or anyone else beat Nixon in the election and the Vietnam war would continue on for seven more long years before ultimately fizzling out for reasons that likely weren’t all that directly related to the counter-culture anti-war movement. Given that I found the moment of rather cheap uplift that the film chose to end on is a bit out of step with where the country was really at in time being depicted. In fact I’d say that ending is also the movie at its worst cinematically as Sorkin really just indulges all his corniest instincts in the last ten minutes or so and Daniel Pemberton’s rather basic score really starts blaring to rather manipulative effect.
Having expressed those issues, I think I’m still going to recommend The Trial of the Chicago 7 without too many reservations. Look, it’s 2020 and we’re starved for real prestige cinema and this thing is filling quite the gap. Sorkin not be the most creative and elegant filmmaker but he remains a writer who can present a story in a fun and accessible way and he’s also assembled a really big and impressive cast and recreates a lot of these events effectively. My worries that it would remind me too much of the world around me in a depressing way were largely unfounded, though under normal circumstances that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Ultimately I think this is a fairly shallow movie about the past which will fit well with boomer self-conceptions but I find it hard to get too grumpy about that in the October of 2020. Definitely a movie worth your time, especially as a Netflix watch, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be returning to it and it could have been much more.
***1/2 out of Five
