‘This is the Academy Awards of protests and as far as I’m concerned…’
People hate injustice. Not in real life of course where injustice prospers every day unchecked and indeed is encouraged by the population at large, but injustice at the death of a cartoon deer say – boy does that get people riled. Nobody is really interested in injustice at a governmental level, but people were ready to riot when Ned Stark had his head chopped off. And I’m no better, damn it. We invest in pop culture because it offers us a goddamn escape from the corruption that has corroded every facet of modern society.
Now, when we have something that combines pop culture and real life injustice, well then we have a powder keg of resentment. This can be used cynically (Making a Murderer, or indeed any true crime documentary) or it can be used to produce a work of art that burns with the fire of righteous indignation. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is one of the few films that achieves this dichotomy, and one of only a handful that does so while remaining incredibly entertaining and watchable.
When the 1968 Democratic National Convention leads to riots in protest against the Vietnam war, the United States Justice Department throws the book at seven activists led by three opposing personalities – easy going Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), the more measured Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), a pacifist and family man. Opposing the Chicago 7 is assistant federal prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the insidious Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella).
If you think that is a stellar cast then you are damn right, and that’s without even mentioning Mark Rylance as the courageous defense lawyer William Kunstler, Succession’s Jeremy Strong as activist Jerry Rubin and Michael Keaton offering a timely cameo as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. This is about as good as an ensemble cast gets in 2021, presumably Elizabeth Moss was busy. It’s not just an exemplary collection of big names however, this is a group at the top of their game working from a script written by one of the greatest writers of his generation. Aaron Sorkin seems to be an easy target for certain sections of the cinema community, but I am a passionate follower of his work (long live Newsroom) and he is at the absolute peak of his powers here, especially considering that he directs the film from his own script.
The story itself is shocking if grimly predictable in places, and it works as a salient reminder to how many of our great institutions are broken, both here in the UK and across the pond. Having said that, this isn’t a preachy movie (by Sorkin’s standards at least), and the director allows the story to make his point rather than ramming it down his viewer’s throats. It is this restraint that makes The Trial of the Chicago 7 one of Sorkin’s finest works.
This is a film that will make you laugh at the absurdity of it all before screaming into a pillow at how unfair the system was, is and probably will allows be, certainly in my lifetime at least. The fact that Sorkin often does all of this within the same scene is a testament to his talents.
Quite simply, one of the best films released in 2020.