3 minute read
American Chaos
BY JOE NOLAN Film Critic
Writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s new Netflix film recreates the trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention police attacks against protestors. The Trial of the Chicago 7 opens with a title montage, barraging viewers with images of American chaos in the late 1960s: Vietnamese jungles engulfed napalm, draft protesters back home, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. The opening of the film also introduces viewers to the various factions converging on the convention: Students for a Democratic Society, the Chicago Police, the Black Panther Party, the Illinois National Guard, Yippie radicals led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the FBI. Before the final title Sorkin cuts to footage of Walter Cronkite announcing that, “The Democratic National Convention is about to take place in a police state.” Sorkin won a Golden Globe for his Steve Jobs (2015) screenplay, and he made his directorial debut with Molly’s Game (2017). Of course Sorkin is a master scribe of stage and television, and he even won an Academy Award for his screenplay about Facebook (The Social Network, 2010). Sorkin stories like Steve Jobs, The Social Network and Moneyball (2011) manage to make incredibly compelling stories out of mundane settings like the behind-the-scenes hubbub of a computer launch or the mathematics behind building a baseball team on the cheap. The trial that followed the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was anything but mundane. And this production pairs of one of America’s best dramatists with one of America’s most intense historical courtroom dramas.
The titular trial attempted to prosecute a Who’s Who of American leftist radicals with the Rap Brown Act, which made conspiring to travel across state lines to incite violence a federal offense with a sentence of up to ten years. The law was a remnant of the Jim Crow era, originally created to crackdown on Civil Rights protestors. The prosecution occurred after Nixon won the 1968 presidential race and his administration sought to make an example of the protesters as part of their law and order platform. Again, Sorkin seamlessly incorporates all of this exposition into one closed-door meeting between prosecutor Richard Schulz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell (John Doman).
That first scene of the film gives viewers the context they need to understand the real life events depicted in the film, but it also introduces Sorkin’s all star cast which includes Sascha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong, who play Youth International Party co-founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin like a stoned and scene-stealing Cheech and Chong act. Mark Rylance plays legendary defense attorney William Kunstler with rumpled gravitas, and Eddie Remayne plays Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden through a veil troubled idealism. Frank Langella evokes Judge Julius Walker with bravura belligerence and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is volcanic as Black Panther Party leader, Bobby Seale.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 opened in select theaters before its streaming debut on Netflix this week, and the movie is already charging to the front of the Oscar buzz queue. Last year I gushed about Todd Haynes’ Mark Ruffalo film Dark Waters and predicted that the movie marked a return of the courtroom drama to American cinema. The Trial of the Chicago 7 joins Michael Almereyda’s visionary, lo-fi Tesla, and Abel Ferrara’s Siberia on my best American films of 2020 list, and its First Amendment themes couldn’t be more timely.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 comes to Netflix this Friday, Oct. 16.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/ songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.
