The Trial of the Chicago 7: Sacha Baron Cohen channels his inner Abbie Hoffman and Aaron Sorkin's machine-gun dialogue finds a perfect soap-box
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
As time passes, most people remember the infamous 1969 Chicago Seven trial for the then-unbelievable act by Judge Julius Hoffman of having Black Panther leader Bobby Seale bound and gagged in court – as referenced in the opening lines of Graham Nash’s’ song Chicago.
That horrific low point in American jurisprudence is indeed to be found in The Trial of the Chicago 7, the Netflix movie Aaron Sorkin may have been born to write.
Yippies Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) make an entrance.
Still, it’s not the movie’s main point – Seale’s story being almost entirely separate from that of his fellow defendants. He didn’t even know most of those accused of fomenting anti-Vietnam War riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He was simply a target of the FBI’s policy of jailing Black Panthers whenever possible, even if they had to fabricate evidence to do it.
But Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), does provide a thematic bridge between the years 1968 and 2020. There were middle-class white kid protesters and there were Black protesters whose stakes were higher. Indeed, Seale’s friend Fred Hampton (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), the head of the Chicago Panthers and an attendee at the trial, was killed by a police bullet midway through proceedings.
But Sorkin’s love of machine-gun dialogue is best indulged in the personae of Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), a two-man comedy act who heckle the judge throughout.
A PROUD SUPPORTER OF ORIGINAL-CIN
Sorkin didn’t need to try very hard to make 1968 sound a lot like now. Law and order – a term we hear a lot lately – amounted to excessive use of force, by police who’d blithely remove their badges before wielding their clubs. And somehow, unarmed protesters were deemed to blame for the police violence.
Writer/director Sorkin (this was once to be a Steven Spielberg project) does a commendable job of getting the details mostly right – including the demented rage of the notorious Judge Hoffman (wonderfully played by Frank Langella). The always-terrific Mark Rylance is nicely cast as activist lawyer Wiiliam Kunstler. And Sorkin maybe allows a smidge too much humanity to federal prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who, y’know, sometimes looks sad while doing his job and following orders of the Nixon White House.
The trial was a farce for many reasons – not least because the supposed “conspirators” mostly didn’t know each other, and the ones that did, often didn’t like each other.
And Sorkin finds his narrative focus in the dislike between the clean-cut Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), the leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the loud, sharp-tongued and bellicose Hoffman.
Hayden, who went on to a career in California state politics and marriage to Jane Fonda, is the defendant with the most trust in the system. He considers Hoffman the worst thing that could happen to the anti-war movement, a clown who’d destroy their credibility. “You know, Abbie’s a lot smarter than you think he is,” Kunstler tells him at one point. “A cow is smarter than I think he is,” Hayden replies in true Sorkin style.
Their arc of their fractious relationship gives the movie some dramatic heft (Baron Cohen, in particular, dominates his scenes). The riots themselves – and various underhanded Chicago police tactics, including an undercover “honey trap” - are visited piecemeal in bite-sized flashbacks. And oddly, the Vietnam War itself gets short shrift until a powerful scene at the very end.
Given The Trial of the Chicago 7’s snapshot of an era of an almost hopelessly divided America, and Kafka-esque and monstrous misuse of power by a bullying President, the timing for its release couldn’t be better.
The Trial of the Chicago 7. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Frank Langella. Opens in theatres Friday, October 2, and debuts on Netflix on Friday, October 16.