Film review: The Trial of the Chicago 7's protests and farcical legal fights hit a timely note
Scenes of riots in the streets and rebels taking on government provide an entertaining, if unwieldy, history lesson
Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong play Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Screens at the Vancity Theatre from October 9 to 15. Available on Netflix starting October 16
TAKE AWAY the bellbottoms, the white-dude Afros, and the tie-dye headbands, and the street-protest scenes in Aaron Sorkin’s new The Trial of the Chicago 7 could be lifted from news footage of Portland or Washington right now—complete with teargas and riot police.
And while his talky, frenzied look at the revolutionary ’60s plays out like a manic courtroom drama, it’s a timely reminder that shockingly little has changed since the emergence of youth leaders like Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, and Allan Ginsberg. The hippies, students, and Black activists of 50 years ago were shit disturbers on par with any of the protesters marching the streets today.
The subject matter is wide-reaching, tackling themes from police violence to racism to freedom of speech. The cast is so big Sorkin puts text with names and titles over each character as he’s introduced. (Sadly, this is a male world, save for one random bra-burning scene that Sorkin seems to feel obliged to throw in.)
An introductory montage blazes through the headspinning amount of unrest in 1968, starting with the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and leading to the upping of drafts from 10,000 to 30,000 for the Vietnam War. And the riots of this film happen, outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. By 1969, the President Richard Nixon’s new attorney general wants heads to roll. His prosecutors charge notorious Yippies Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Students for a Democratic Society founder Tom Hayden, 50-ish conscientious objector David Dellinger, and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, among others, with inciting a riot.
In a clever device, Sorkin waits until late in the film to reveal the true scale of the violence that happened in Chicago, and who started it, via flashbacks. The early part of The Trial of the Chicago 7 concentrates on the courtroom antics—and much of it plays out as farce. Hoffman and Rubin (Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong) are clowns, sometimes showing up in judicial robes, or shouting out “Overruled!” before the judge can say it. (This really happened, apparently.) Sorkin struggles a bit with tone in these sequences, landing somewhere between the cartoonishly funny and the earnestly political. Still, the court’s most egregious act, against Seale late in the trial, hits the horrifying note it needs to.
The tensions in the film go beyond the generational; the Yippie hippies are constantly at odds with the other youth leaders, namely the tightly buttoned Hayden, who would prefer to follow the rules of the courtroom to get his way.
Mostly thanks to Sorkin’s rhetoric-filled, volleying dialogue, you’re often aware of people acting. The exceptions are Eddie Redmayne’s serious Hayden, Mark Rylance’s calm but quietly outraged defence lawyer William Kuntsler, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s rightfully pissed off Seale. Cohen does something interesting with Hoffman, taking him from court jester to sage leader—and Sorkin does a nice job of interweaving his later cross-country standup accounts of the whole affair. But the standout is Frank Langella’s incompetent Judge Julius Hoffman, a villain for the ages who can’t even get people’s names right, let alone acknowledge that Seale has no counsel.
Sorkin's ambitions sometimes get the better of him, the unwieldy story occasionally becoming a farcical mess. Then again, that's a pretty accurate reflection of American politics, then as much as now. Ultimately, it's fun to watch the juggling act Sorkin tries for here, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 is one history lesson worth checking out--especially as November 3 looms.
Related Articles
