The confused politics of ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’
By Jake Skubish
The Trial of the Chicago 7 appears on the surface to be a project naturally suited for writer-director Aaron Sorkin: a courtroom drama set against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in American political history. From his Broadway interpretation of To Kill a Mockingbird to his four seasons writing The West Wing, it’s familiar territory. If you want a rousing speech about the need to defend American institutions, Sorkin is your man.
But Chicago 7 also marks a crucial departure for Sorkin. His work has always been defined by the interior machinations of the most powerful people in America; you could hardly come up with a more elite list of subjects than the U.S. president, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, executives for a professional sports franchise and a cable news network, and a cabal of celebrity poker players. In Chicago 7 Sorkin shifts his focus from these establishment figures to the people trying to disrupt them, in this case at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Has Sorkin been radicalized by the real-life collapse of democracy? Has he concluded that an exalted veneration of American values no longer resonates in an increasingly cynical nation? The answer at the end of Chicago 7 is a resounding no. The film is classic Sorkin, with dramatic courtroom outbursts and impassioned speeches abound. It is also largely still about the administrative process of justice; Sorkin is far more interested in the judicial proceedings than the riots that got our defendants there.
Does it work? In bits and pieces, yes. There are plenty of scenes elevated by Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire exchanges, such as the cross-cutting introduction to the characters in the opening minutes and the tense exchange between Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) about the best way to force change (“We define winning differently, you and I”). Chicago 7 also features slower moments that go beyond the bounds of Sorkin’s typical range. The best scene of the movie takes place about an hour in, when lawyer William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) and Hayden go to prison to inform Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) that Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) has been killed by the police.
The scene is set up with the expectation of reconciliation: Kunstler and Hayden are offering their sympathy, and Seale may finally acquiesce to letting Kunstler represent him in court. But Seale pointedly exposes the insincerity in the neutral language Kunstler uses to describe the tragedy (“There was a police raid, and there was a shootout, and he’s dead”) and succinctly captures how the stakes of the revolution differ between himself and Hayden. “Your life, it’s a fuck-you to your father, right?” Seale asks Hayden about his activism. “You can see how that’s different from a rope on a tree?”
Throughout Chicago 7 Sorkin attempts to wake us up to the urgency of the fight for justice. In one laughably transparent metaphor for our collective blindness, the police corner a group of protestors right outside a swanky tavern. A woman inside notices and says, to no one in particular, “Am I the only one who sees what’s going on out there?” No one else turns to look, until the protestors come crashing through the window.
The film’s crucial shortcoming is that it’s never clear whose brand of justice Sorkin wants us to sympathize with. It is at once the buttoned-up electioneering of Hayden and the high-minded antics of Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong). It is both the moral decency exemplified by an Attorney General that oversaw the Vietnam War and the moral righteousness of the Black Panthers who fought adamantly against it. And, in being all of these things at once, the film dissolves into not much at all.
I’m not so wrapped up in my political convictions that I need my movies to demand universal health care, but if a film is going to take on the American political system then it should stand for something. Sorkin has always abided by the Great Man theory, and his work is often exhilarating. But the squishiness of his values when applied to politics render them dissatisfying. Perhaps that’s why the best of his work exists outside the political realm. In Moneyball and The Social Network, singular visionaries change a system, for better or worse. In the process, they reveal more about American values than the films that try to take on the nation’s woes directly.
If Chicago 7 fades down the stretch it is certainly not due to the performances, which are strong across the board. The bench is deep, and probably too deep. The need to cover all the players in the courtroom is understandable, but there are characters who we could stand to see more of (government lawyer Richard Schultz, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) or less of (as good he is, the film bizarrely turns itself over to Rylance for long stretches). Abdul-Mateen II provides a standout performance, as does the infuriatingly talented Redmayne, who will likely be in contention for an Oscar.
Joining him, I hope, will be his co-star Cohen, although not for his performance as Abbie Hoffman but as Borat in the surprise sequel coming later this week. Chicago 7 proves Sorkin is still a prodigious writer, and few are better at waxing poetic about American institutions. But his attempt in Chicago 7 to consider the failures of those institutions falls a little flat. For an incisive look at the nation’s darker corridors, I look forward to a film that knows where it stands.