‘Trial of Chicago 7’ review: Aaron Sorkin takes Daley’s ’68 nightmare to court
Brilliantly cast, full of juicy verbal confrontations and only slightly undermined by its director, "The Trial of the Chicago 7” hits the righteous indignation spot. The writer is Aaron Sorkin. The director is also Aaron Sorkin.
It’ll certainly hit home for Chicagoans who remember 1968 and 1969, as well as Chicagoans who know full well what has boiled these few months of 2020, and why.
In late August 1968, the Democratic National Convention began and soon became a secondary narrative. Lincoln Park and, across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel convention headquarters, Grant Park drew tens of thousands of demonstrators. The police had their orders. The whole world watched. Hundreds arrested. Hundreds clubbed and injured on all sides, although much later a federal commission declared it a police riot. That came later.
Eight men, representing the full spectrum of the dissident left, were indicted for conspiracy to cross state lines in order to incite that riot. The trial for seven of them — Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale ended up being tried separately — started 13 months after the bloodshed. It took five months, a mistrial, some suspected jury tampering and egregious prejudice and mishandling from the bench to render the whole thing a farce, albeit a farce with deadly serious stakes.
Sorkin has been working on this project for 15 years. It was never not ripe for adaptation. (Several have tried, in both documentary and docudrama.) At this particular flashpoint, though, the trial speaks directly to memories of our city’s image under Richard J. Daley, and how that image speaks, in turn, to where are today.
“Daley is not going to let his city turn into a theater of war!” This ironically short-sighted bit of foreshadowing is spoken by the pacifist David Dellinger, Boy Scout leader and head of the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, played by the reliably excellent John Carroll Lynch.
“Chicago is more (expletive) up than any 10 things I’ve ever seen in my life!” So growls the U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, speaking of the bloodshed in Grant Park in August 1968. John Doman plays Mitchell, and he’d be a fearsome character indeed if we didn’t currently have an AG who can easily outstrip Mitchell for partisan scheming.
“For the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics … they’re not gonna think of equality or justice. They’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress. They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers. And so, we’ll lose elections.” This highly on-brand Sorkin flourish comes from Students for a Democratic Society activist Tom Hayden, played with sly charisma by Eddie Redmayne.
This last bit arrives in a key scene from “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” In a disheveled Hyde Park office, buttoned-down Hayden is squaring off against his ideological frenemy, Youth International Party figurehead Abbie Hoffman, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. They may have the same goal — ending the war in Vietnam — but their methods and tactics couldn’t be less in sync.
Their brotherly tensions account for one-third of what’s going on in the movie. Another third will surprise no one, since the word “trial” is right there in the title. The five-month judicial circus presided over by flagrantly incompetent Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella, lending a smoother, classier air than the real Hoffman ever had) provides the heart of the material. Sorkin plainly loves courtrooms and their perpetual capacity for drama. He wrote “A Few Good Men,” first as a play, then a movie, and he recently adapted Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage. Metaphorically, he’s never far from court; his peak achievement to date, “The Social Network,” is a feast of wormy interrogation and wily rhetoric.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7” proceeds on a checkerboard of flashbacks and flash-forwards, and the movie — wisely — saves most of its various perspectives of the Grant Park melee of August 1968 until midway through. Indoors and outdoors, Sorkin sets one emblem of leftist protest (Hayden) against others (Abbie Hoffman and comrade Jerry Rubin, portrayed with inspired deadpan authority by Jeremy Strong). At its best, this multi-view perspective (Abbie Hoffman relays some of it as part of a stand-up comedy routine, to mixed results) the material acquires both useful ideological complication and the thing you can typically count on with Sorkin’s lemme-at-it dialogue: blood, thunder and zingers.
I enjoyed it, though a few things hold it back from greatness or really-goodness. Sorkin’s a more interesting writer than he is a director. (His directorial debut, “Molly’s Game,” was smaller but more cinematically assured — another courtroom movie, ultimately.) At times he seems to be aping Steven Spielberg’s momentous-history pictorial approach, which can work marvelously if it’s Spielberg, in the case of “Lincoln,” for example. Once upon a time Spielberg commissioned Sorkin to write a Chicago 7 trial movie for him, and the result, all these years later, is this one.
Sorkin’s camera doesn’t move a lot; he’s a front-and-center, time-for-a-closeup technician, and the way he stages and films the riot footage (interpolated with archival video from, among other sources, Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool”) it’s routine chaos, desperately overscored by composer Daniel Pemberton.
We’re juggling a dozen or so primary characters here, along with several secondary ones. The Black characters felt unduly marginalized. We barely spend time with Bobby Seale, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, which weakens the stunning low point of the trial: When Judge Hoffman ordered Seale to be bound and gagged, in court, after a string of contempt citations. (Younger viewers may not be able to believe this actually happened; then again, they might find it all too easy to believe.)
Alongside and opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as U.S. prosecutor Richard Schultz, nicely modulated in Sorkin’s hands) and all the other inspired casting choices, Mark Rylance kills it, foremost and wryly, as defense attorney William Kunstler. He’s depicted as the blithe, vaguely baked referee overseeing the warring factions played by Redmayne and Cohen. You’d think Cohen, with his comic wiles and stealth range, would be the focal point of the ensemble. He’s not, quite: Maybe he’s a little old for Abbie Hoffman (who was in his early 30s at the time; Cohen is in his late 40s), but it’s more a matter of Cohen going his own, methodical, well-ordered way with a famously camera-seeking and combustible live wire.
So much, of course, is not here because Sorkin made a two-hour movie, not a 15-part series, which these events and the trial alone could’ve supported. The location filming in Chicago, mostly in Grant Park, folds well into the interior scenes, filmed in New Jersey. The movie’s a little glib throughout (I don’t love the overture and introductions, which are scored and edited like a rock opera). Sorkin’s writing may be better served by a director who can bring a new set of perspectives and dynamics to the work, rather than simply presenting them head-on. Yet it works anyway. The actors win on appeal. And it’s always worth revisiting this particular chapter of Chicago unrest and injustice, because that chapter, tragically, is always up for another rewrite.
Three stars (out of four)
MPAA rating: R (for language throughout, some violence, bloody images and drug use)
Running time: 2:09
Premieres: Friday at Landmark Century Centre, iPic Bolingbrook and iPic South Barrington. Netflix streaming premiere Oct. 16.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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