THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (Aaron Sorkin 2020)

AARON SORKIN: THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (2020) - Netflix

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DEFENDANTS AND LAWYER IN THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

A hilarious and instructive time-capsule

In an interesting recent Times op-ed piece, a young man now preparing his doctorate at Cambridge talks about how he worked his way up from a very rough start in America - seven foster homes. TV was central as a teacher as well as a babysitter in his early years, and "The Fresh Prince" and "The O.C." were important guides to class. They showed him just money wasn't the thing; education counts a lot. Then when in the military, he got to pal around with a recent Yale graduate, and discovered him watching something on his Macbook. It was "The West Wing." He rushed to watch it. He didn't think it was very good. He learned he wasn't supposed to like it. It was made for and scored high with high-income and well educated classes.

He learned and thought more, looking at the characters. "They engaged in fierce debate with political foes, but respected them too. The characters who staffed the Bartlet administration were highly educated, extremely witty, clever and idealistic. It made me wonder: Was this show so popular among elite college graduates because they saw aspirational versions of themselves in it? And if this was how they aspired to be, was this also how I should aspire to be?"

Sometimes people are impatient with Sorkin, as shown by widespread condemnation of his later series, "Newsroom," even by The New Yorker's authoritative (and witty)]Emily Nussbaum. It has taken me time to realize that not everyone loves Sorkin's writing, though a large number seem to approve his 2010 skewering of Facebook's founder in The Social Network, whose New York Film Festival premiere made this writer a Sorkin convert.

With this context it's clear, anyway, why Aaron Sorkin took on the subject of the Chicago 7 trial. This crazy legal travesty and media circus that followed the Democratic convention of 1968 and the huge demonstrations at the height of the anti-Vietnam War moment brings to light a bunch of important moral and political issues, and the issues of police-initiated riots and a corrupt judiciary are extremely relevant today. The courtroom and the assembling of these outspoken defendants is a golden opportunity for Sorkin to display his talent for wit and intelligent dialogue in a context of moral urgency.

Sorkin establishes the context at the beginning of the film. The Vietnam War has been stepped up dramatically by President Lyndon B. Johnson and the anti-War movement is raging on many fronts, from the serious revolutionary spirit of SDS co-founder Tom Hayden to the traditional pacifism of David Dellinger, with the provocative, grandstanding agitprop of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in between. The pretext of the trial, we learn, was false: These eight people had not conspired, and some of them had never met. Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale had oly been in Chicago for four hours, to give a speech. The outgoing Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, had determined that the riots at the Democratic National Convention had been started by the police, urged on by Mayor Richard M. Daley. The trial was instigated by NIxon's new Attorney General, John Mitchell, whose main concern seems to be that Ramsey Clark didn't vacate the office as fast as he would like.

If you're looking for a good time, and maybe for either a nostalgia fest or a history lesson, Trial is a safe bet. It has its delights and its disappointments too. It's a little hard for the actual film to live up to the sheer fun of seeing a cast roster combining such unexpected Brits as Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Mark Rylance with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the chief federal prosecutor, Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin and Michael Keaton as Ramsey Clark.

Baron Cohen particularly surprises and shines as the Yippie provocateur Abbie Hofman, and incidentally his achievement of a pitch-perfect Worcester, Mass. accent will be one of the unsung triumphs of the film. Frank Langella, now 80, is, as always, impressive; his Judge Hoffman is suitably appalling without ever being a caricature. In Sorkin's script, Hoffman's inability to get the names straight gives Abbie Hoffman a chance for a witty corrective distinguishing Dillinger, Derringer, and Dellinger. A lot of this stuff didn't really quite happen as neatly as Sorkin writes and, stages it: he's condensing a 5-month trial, after all. Some things manifestly don't work. As the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is explosive and strong, but the brutality of Seale's treatment in the courtroom is somewhat underplayed. Mark Rylance is a disappointment as chief defense counsel William Kunstler. Neither his soft-spoken manner nor the appeasing writing does justice to the bold authority of the real Kunstler. This, in reality, was a very complex show. Sorkin doesn't get everything right.

In fact, this would have worked well as a mini-series, and the high-speed mashups of courtroom scenes with background scenes of the lead-up events, thanks to the dubious facility bestowed on editor Alan Baumgarten by digital technology, only heightens our awareness that there are a lot of people and events condensed into these packed two hours. Nonetheless, writer-director Sorkin and his cast and crew have put a together a fabulously effective combination of entertainment and instruction, a movie that reminds, or teaches, us a whole lot about the main issues in America of the Sixties while the repartee and dramatic stunners make the run-time breeze by.

Nonetheless Sorkin-haters will be out in force to condemn this film with the usual accusations. Armond White is not wrong when he says Sorkin "disdains nuance," but goes too far when he calls him "smarmy, cutesy, and fake." Peter Bradshaw shows the usual prejudices and goes way over the top with them when he accuses Sorkin of a tendency to be "fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism," then slings a diminishingly effective series of adjectives: "exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged." It is true Sorkin tweaks facts, true that he has points to make. But he's hardly untrue to the spirit of the momentous period this film tells us so much about. Hopefully this will inspire the young to go back to the history.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, 129 mins., debuted in limited release Sept. 25, 2020, opening on Netflix in the US and many other countries Oct. 16. Metascore 76.

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SACHA BARON COHEN AND JEREMY STRONG IN THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Sounds fantastic!

Hey, Johann, glad to hear from you again.
It is a lot of fun - even if for me it's almost like as if reading the cast list was the highlight!

Cool....this is one I want to see.

Hope you do.

The Climb. (Covino)
There's also a new US fiction feature I think is brilliant and hilarious that comes out next Friday, Nov. 13. I have a review waiting. It's Michael Angelo Covino's THE CLIMB. I just watched the whole film last night for a second time. Don't watch the trailer. See it whenever you can.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8637440/

They've been holding it since April because they wanted it to be in theaters. It did get to open in Paris in theaters in July and got great reviews. It has some significant nods to France and premiering at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section it won the Jury 'Coup de Coeur' award. AlloCiné 3.9, Metacritic 82. Sony.


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I remember following this in the Tribune, almost every day. I was there... in Grant Park, on (I think it was) August 28, 1968... I suppose I could Google it but I'm doing this from memory. We were just hanging out in the park all afternoon when the pigs arrived in force and surrounded the park. A friend of ours came over and told us there was a way to get out of the park without intersecting with the police. We cut through next to some large TV trucks parked along Michigan Avenue and started walking up an alley when a cop came running after us, screaming for us to stop. While he had a pot belly and we were 16. Guess who won that race? When we made it out to the street, we beelined for the "L" and hopped on the next train. We changed trains and headed out to the western suburbs as we were staying in Oak Park. That's when we heard all hell broke loose. It was a crazy week... we went to see 2001 at the Cinestage in 70mm. But when the movie was over, they had padlocked the front doors and made us all go out into the alley. A huge demonstration passed by with one guy waving an enormous North Vietnam flag. There were armed soldiers on the street corners, rifles and everything. This guy almost ran me down, walking past so fast. It was Roger Mudd of CBS News! Imagine. Crazy week. Saw lots of S - H - I - T! Oh, the stories I could tell...

Great stuff, cinemabon. Welcome back. How did you like the Netfilx film?

I thought it represented a very good depiction of what happened at the time. They always employ dramatic license and that's to be expected. That Cohen, who is already outspoken, should play Hoffman sounds almost type-cast. It's difficult to make a trial movie effective entertainment in this age of superhero movies and action films. I thought the writing helped to sell this film (as we would probably agree, if its not on the page, it's not on the screen). Great review, Chris, as always. I've been reading your reviews and try to chime in to let you know I care, I'm interested.

Thanks, cinemabon. There have been many good reactions to the film and people are watching it a lot. I think if anyone today could make a good courtroom drama it's Sorkin, and he could even have gotten by with more courtroom and fewer background scenes. Sacha Baran Cohen is just the most noticeable of a bunch of eye-popping, fun casting ideas.

Mike D'angelo privately pans Sorkin's new film, citing factual distortions.

In an unpublished Patreon subsribers' "review" (or more like rating with commentary) Mike D'Angelo is highly critical of TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 as follows (whole text below, sent as an email to subscribers today, Jan. 29, 2021, three months after the Netflix release). I do not think it is fair or good reviewing to omit mention of the film's many good features, and it's not sufficient to say he "generally enjoys" "the man's [Aaron Sorkin's] zippy bandinage," but if all these facts are falsified, one must take notice. Further I will grant that a thoroughly recorded event like a trial may be more questionable or trickier to "Sorkin-ize" than a series of events less known to outsiders like the creation of Facebook.

D'Angelo:

Quote:

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49/100

Not a subject that needed Sorkin-izing, as Brett Morgen's far superior Chicago 10 demonstrated 14 years ago. We get snippets of the same (or similar) documentary footage here, interspersed with dramatic re-creation; Sorkin apparently fears that younger, historically ignorant viewers might think he's exaggerated what went down at the convention. Any such suspicion would be entirely justified, though, since he blithely, needlessly distorts so much else. Bobby Seale alone demands a lengthy fact-check: Not only does this film skate past Kunstler having briefly represented Seale in pre-trial motions (which was Judge Hoffman's stated justification for insisting that Kunstler was still Seale's attorney), it also pretends that Fred Hampton's murder (on 4 December 1969) inspired the outburst that got Seale bound and gagged (on 29 October 1969). And then, incredibly, Sorkin downplays that horror, having the judge instantly declare a mistrial rather than conducting three full trial days with Seale shouting muffled objections through the cloth in his mouth. I'm by no means categorically opposed to tweaking history for dramaturgy's sake, but each of these decisions weakens rather than strengthens an inherently compelling story. So does shameless claptrap like Rubin whining about having fallen for an undercover FBI agent (Sorkin made that up), and ultra-pacifist Dellinger striking someone in anger (Sorkin made that up), and Ramsey Clark executing an elaborate fake-out when asked to testify (Sorkin made that up), and jesus the cornball ending with Hayden (it was actually Dellinger, but let that one slide) reading the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam as everyone including the sympathetic prosecutor (Sorkin made that up) rises to their feet while Judge Hoffman keeps banging his gavel and shouting for order. Performances are fine, apart from Baron Cohen obviously being way too old, and there's plenty of the man's zippy badinage, which I generally enjoy in wholly or at least primarily fictional contexts. Here, he chose a context I already know well and added little of value.

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