What little I know about the actual trial of the Chicago 7 I learned from author Ron Perlstein’s 2008 social history Nixonland. The Nixon Justice Department liked to arrest groups of people and charge them collectively with conspiracy and the like in trials that never really ended in convictions and were mostly to sow political favor with anyone who wasn’t much of a fan of hippies and other activists. The Chicago 7 were just the most prominent, and the trial ended with the defendants eventually found innocent and the case dropped. Perlstein didn’t go into particularly deep detail since that wasn’t the point of the book, writing as he was about a decade’s worth of social and political upheaval, but it gave me a brief look at the famous case.
I ended up loaning Perlstein’s book to my ex-wife’s mother, and that woman has since moved to North Carolina, so I don’t think I’ll be seeing it or my Edmund Morris Theodore Roosevelt biographical trilogy again, but I can see the new dramatization of the trial on Netflix.
The 1968 Democratic National Convention was a contentious moment, and a riot outside left a lot of people and property damaged. The following year, the newly inaugurated Nixon administration’s Attorney General John Mitchell (John Dorman) orders a pair of prosecutors (J.C. MacKenzie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to charge a group of prominent peace activists with conspiracy under a law that probably wasn’t intended to be enforced that way. Eight men are arrested and charged with the various offenses. Among them are Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), college peace activists Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), older pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), two other guys who don’t do much in the movie (for good reason), and Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). That would be eight people in the Chicago 7, but as Seale points out, he was arrested separately somewhere else, so he isn’t counted among them.
By the by, that’s a mighty impressive cast, and that’s not even getting into Frank Langella as the judge and Michael Keaton as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Defending everyone but Seale is colorful attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), and the 7 will need it. The prosecutors have a lot of witnesses on their side to say what they want to hear, and the judge seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure the group is found guilty. Seale doesn’t have a lawyer. His own had to have a gall bladder removed, and Seale and Kunstler have to keep reminding the judge that Kunstler is not representing Seale, and Seale isn’t even being permitted to represent himself, so if we wanted a clear view that the Constitution was being trampled by all this, it isn’t exactly subtle. That said, I don’t think anyone has ever credibly accused writer/director Aaron Sorkin of subtly.
As timely as the movie is, it does show a rather rambunctious trial as the Seven (plus Seale) are railroaded through the system in the most unfair way possible. The deck was stacked against them long before they were even arrested, and the different members of the group don’t exactly approach the problem with the same mindset. Despite the fact the charges are laughable (Seale notes he hasn’t even met some of the men he allegedly conspired with before, and he wasn’t even involved in the riot), the Justice Department seems bound and determined to send them to prison. Gordon-Levitt’s young prosecutor, possibly a fictional character, is clearly unhappy with everything but just doing his job, but the real drama is on the side of the 7. Redmayne’s Hayden is an idealist who still believes in and respects the system, thinking they just need to win more elections to make the necessary changes to the country. The Yippies, as expressed best by Cohen’s Hoffman, see the whole thing as an absurd joke and treat it that way at first, believing that the system itself may need to go. While the pair don’t clash much in the course of the movie, it is clear they have very different attitudes and goals on what to do here. Granted, that further shows how absurd the conspiracy charges are to begin with, but here we are.
Now, I am certain much of this is a dramatization, but there’s always the timing issue. Keaton’s Clark has to, at one point, remind Langella’s judge that the Attorney General is not the President’s personal attorney, and other abuses by the Justice Department are present throughout the film, particularly as the trial seems to be acting as a distraction from a bigger event that deserves more notice, in this case the Vietnam War. Sorkin is a very astute writer and director. I am sure that the timing of this excellent legal drama was not a coincidence.
Grade: A
0 Comments