In The Trial of the Chicago 7,’ Sorkinism rules

Nanoseconds after the film has started, doubts about the director’s suitability for the subject matter dissolve. The Trial of the Chicago 7 offers proof of writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s talent for banalizing social protest, lampooning political radicalism, and making special pleas on behalf of government institutions. It’s a clever, stupid, bad entertainment that doesn’t bore — the Sorkin specialty from A Few Good Men (1992) and The West Wing to Molly’s Game (2017). Shaping this project after years of rumors that Steven Spielberg would direct starring Will Smith as Bobby Seale and Heath Ledger as Tom Hayden, Sorkin perform a mind-meld: he thinks his showman’s instincts can best reproduce the real life courtroom antics of Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) on realizing the American government wants to railroad them.

Welcome back to Sorkinland, where the good guys are good and bad guys are bad except for the bad guy whom Sorkin telegraphs is Morally Conflicted from the start and whom Sorkin shows to be a Pretty Good Guy (think of J.T. Walsh in A Few Good Men, wasting several careers of subtlety in a picture that deserved less). This figure in moral twilight, Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), assistant attorney for the Southern District, annoys Attorney General John Mitchell (John Doman), the latter determined to make examples of these long-haired daisy-clutching hippies and dangerous Black men toting rifles. We know Mitchell is bad because Doman played an asshole cop in The Wire, Sorkin grants flattering closeups of Johnny Walker tumblers enjoyed in the attorney general’s office, and he’s the most hyper-literate of villains. “These men are petulant and dangerous,” he declares to Schultz and Schultz’s boss, prosecutor Thomas Foran. For good measure, he fulminates against the alleged discourtesy of outgoing attorney general Ramsay Clark (Michael Keaton), a point to which the film will return with a payoff later.

What the audience hears during The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s 125-minute running time is the wheezing and clanking of courtroom drama cliches, spiced up with cuts to Hoffman riffing on the trial in standup comic fashion to adoring crowds, and the actual protests in Chicago’s Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic convention — crowd scenes that would not satisfy Gillo Pontecorvo, much less Sergei Eisenstein. As Hoffman, Cohen has garnered the kind of praise critics lard out whenever a comic actor essays a Serious Role; but Cohen does play the psychology student turned activist for laughs, especially when the Massachusetts accents stretches wide enough to accommodate Sorkin’s quips, and when he’s supposed to say something meaningful he is, like Peter Sellers, a studied blank; he talks as if a recorder were playing in his head.

Treating Seale and the Black Panthers for laffs is Chicago 7‘s most grievous mistake. With his defense attorney confined to bed, Seale had no counsel, and the 7’s own counsel William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) is reluctant to tie the fate of his white defendants to Seale’s. Judge Hoffman, however, refused to grant his wish to represent himself. When an infuriated Seale eventually denounces “jive lying witnesses” and “racist cops and pigs,” the judge orders him bound and gagged. The racial overtones are startling, and Sorkin filming this sequence as a montage signals he knows what he’s up to: he wants the audience, aware of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. the previous year and the Nixon administration’s hostility to civil rights, jolted and disgusted. Although the judge’s cruelty is enough to disgust even Schultz and get Seale severed from the case (while still sentenced to four years in prison on contempt charges), the episode throws the picture off-kilter; its gravitas doesn’t fit Sorkin’s screwball instincts.

If Sorkin had an imagination, I’d posit he cast these actors with a sense of Borgesian intrigue. Having played Richard Nixon as a cryogenic freeze survivor in the snoozer Frost/Nixon (2008), Langella plays Julius Hoffman as an imperious, repulsive Nixonian fellow traveler. Eddie Redmayne plays Hayden as a dull squish, which makes sense, for Redmayne as an actor is himself a dull squish, with a mien as vacant as a parking garage at night. He’s not Hayden, he’s Peter Pan; it’s impossible to think this guy could’ve written the Port Huron Statement. The same applies to Michael Keaton as star witness Ramsay Clark, whose absurdist mockery — the mockery of a scion who knows he’s untouchable — is too modern for the film; he also lacks the solemnity expected of a  former attorney general. By the time Clark appears, the fact that the judge won’t allow his testimony has no dampening effect. I didn’t care. (The other defendants Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner have little to do, so once in a while Sorkin will toss the actors a line to remind audiences they exist.)

To consult the Wiki page on the trial would waste the audience’s time. In Sorkinland we know what happens. The liberal learns to respect the radical’s passion, the radical the liberal’s commitment to the system. Figuring out which gets to deliver the barnburning speech to thunderous Hollywood music at a key moment generates some suspense. In the end the American Way is reaffirmed. Crass, bogus, and self-deluded in every pore, The Trial of the Chicago 7 shows how the American Way and Sorkinism are indivisible, especially when plot mechanics conspire with history to remove the only important Black person and the only notable female character is an FBI informant (Sorkin’s TV shows and movies of late regard women as a species that distracts men from the business of manhood). The American Way and Sorkinism require white men of courage to perform their polysyllabic expressions of duty.

GRADE:  C