The Trial of the Chicago 7

Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin on the set

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin

The Chicago 7 minus David Dellinger

Abbie Hoffman

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7             B-                                                                              USA  Great Britain  India     (129 mi)  2020 ‘Scope  d:  Aaron Sorkin

A look back at a moment in history, at the height of the anti-war and Civil Rights movements, when the United States government tried to put a list of prominent outspoken activists who barely knew each other on trial for conspiring to initiate violent riots in Chicago during an eventful summer of 1968 simultaneous to the election of the Democratic candidate for President, Hubert Humphrey, who vowed to continue the war and was subsequently annihilated by Richard Nixon in the election (while the popular vote was close, Nixon won by over 100 Electoral votes), bringing in a new wave of repressive tactics, with the intention of removing the leftist guard, namely Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), eventually dropped from the case in a mistrial, Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), who comes across clean as a boy scout, Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), a nebulous, shadowy character, David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), the ever peaceful conscientious objector who slugs a federal marshal in court, crossing into absurdity, as that’s something he would never have done, Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), ever confrontational, given a Lenny Bruce style stand-up comedic role, touring college campuses during the trial to raise money for the defense, Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), second banana to Hoffman, always stoned, John Froines, and Lee Weiner, two add-ons who were eventually acquitted, who were all viewed as a threat to the government.  While they organized protest marches and rock concerts at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, clashes broke out between protesters and the police turning into a full-scale riot, complete with tear gas and police beatings.  The press, already there to cover the Democratic convention, captured the overreaction by police and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s handling of the situation.  Due to the embarrassment brought to the city for its own outrageous behavior, eight men and two defense counselors were blamed as scapegoats.  The trial itself lasted 10-months, received heightened press coverage, becoming something of a public spectacle, where the 60’s counterculture movement was really on trial, so they brought in various artists to testify by performing anti-war songs, including Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, and Country Joe McDonald, also writers Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg testified, as well as Timothy Leary and Jesse Jackson.  The trial itself was nothing short of a fiasco, filled with disruptions, outbursts, histrionics, and accusations, where the film version is a rather homogenized and cleaned-up version of what actually happened, as any trial that carried on as long as this one did, scrutinized by daily press briefings, was actually much more ostentatiously out of control than is suggested here, with many more threats from the bench from constant interruptions, routinely handing out a total of 159 contempt citations, citing lead attorney William Kunstler with four years in prison for addressing him as “Mr. Hoffman” instead of “Your Honor,” Abbie Hoffman received 8 months for laughing in court, Tom Hayden one year for protesting the gag and shackle treatment of defendant Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner two months for refusing to stand when Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) entered the courtroom, a judge who had previously ruled in the Lenny Bruce censorship trials.  Perhaps the most egregious judicial offense was ordering barbers of the Cook County Jail to cut the long hair of the defendants and defense attorneys that he found so offensive.  The film didn’t get into the senility of the judge, age 74, a concern many had at the time.  In fact there were so many judicial errors committed during the trial that all convictions and numerous contempt citations were quickly overturned on appeal, with no new charges filed, finding the judge had exhibited a “deprecatory and often antagonistic attitude toward the defense,” making the whole trial a mockery of justice.  This was clearly evident to the public and the press even as the trial was dragging on, not so much to viewers of this film, which isn’t in the same league as Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and compares poorly to Brett Morgen’s animated CHICAGO 10 (2007) which uses actual trial transcripts, as opposed to Sorkin straining credulity through artistic license by offering a more polite and conciliatory rewrite of history that diffuses the hard corps radicalism of the times with an invented bipartisan utopia, where he just never gets the tone right, veering into the ridiculous and the absurd.    

Like other Sorkin movies, including David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), the opening sequence is usually the most riveting moment in the film, which is the case here as well.  Shocking viewers at the outset is the Kafkaesque moment when a politically motivated Attorney General John Mitchell (John Doman) sends for U.S. Attorney Thomas Foran (J.C. MacKenzie) and his leading federal prosecutor Richard Schultz (straight arrow Joseph Gordon-Levitt), basically assigning them the case, using the untested Rap Brown Law, which had been tagged onto the Civil Rights Bill earlier that year by conservative southern Senators making it illegal to cross state lines in order to incite a riot, a blatant attempt to suppress black activism.  What stands out, however, is the rabidly zealous nature of Mitchell who is hellbent on sending these leftist radicals to jail, viewing the trial as a kind of payback.  But it’s a contrast in cultural attitudes and understandings, where under the scrutiny of Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton, a wild card) as Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, they believed no crimes were committed, and that any evidence of riots were instigated by the Chicago police.  Yet under Nixon as President, his new Attorney General John Mitchell was livid about finding wrongdoing even when there was none to be found, with history suggesting they were the actual wrongdoers, as 48 top government officials were eventually convicted of crimes in the coverup of Watergate, including John Mitchell, who was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury while sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison, with the President resigning in disgrace before an inevitable impeachment.  While this sequence does beg the question, who starts riots on the streets, police or the protesters, the question is still relevant today, with Trump’s Attorney General William Barr threatening to revive this same Rap Brown Law against George Floyd protesters, believing crossing state lines to incite violence is a federal crime, but stopped short when it was discovered right-wing extremists actually infiltrated the peaceful Black Lives Matter protests to commit violent acts in order to undermine their public standing.  Clearly this is governmental overreach, setting boundaries on first amendment rights by suppressing the rights of dissent, mirroring Trump’s own Presidential declaration in 2017 that the press was the enemy of the people, speaking the typical jargon of autocrats and dictators.  With this opening conversation, however, the tone is set, subsequently introducing the major players, who appear without much of a build-up, where the idea of a 60’s counterculture may be foreign to viewing audiences half a century later.  Battle lines were tested in the summer of 1968, still struggling with enforcing Civil Rights legislation, dazed by the riotous aftermath of political assassinations, wearied by an unpopular war in Vietnam causing more than a thousand deaths per month, stunned by a rejection of women’s rights and female empowerment in the workplace, while bigotry and age-old prejudices were being challenged by a younger generation that rejected those demeaning practices outright, even as they continued to be practiced throughout mainstream society and in all middle-class homes.  Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were household names to anyone growing up, as they advocated a different kind of freedom than the conservatism of the 50’s, with Hoffman publishing Steal This Book, which may as well be an irreverent counterculture guide to activism, while Rubin’s DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution was less popular, yet still culturally impactive, leading two decades later to Nike’s massive advertising campaign, “Just do it.”  Drugs and rock music were the real cultural signposts, along with Timothy Leary’s psychedelic manta, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” all of which advocated a new type of thinking.  This background is streamlined out of the film, yet it explains why ten thousand strangers would travel to Chicago to camp out in the city parks without permission during the Democratic convention, facing a police-orchestrated riot as anti-war protesters tried to demonstrate for a candidate that would advocate an end to the Vietnam War.  Little did they know they would get their heads bashed in. 

What inevitably happens with Hollywood rewrites of history is that they bear so little in common with actual history, and Sorkin fails to deliver, toning down the rhetoric and flippant comments, removing the radical element, attributing less offensive words at the trial that were never spoken, bringing a Black Panther presence into the courtroom when none existed, even suggesting Fred Hampton sitting behind him acted as Bobby Seale’s attorney, which is completely fabricated, then altering the timeline of Fred Hampton’s murder, The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971).  While there’s some element of truth to Bobby Seale’s comportment in the courtroom, continually interrupting, demanding to act in his own defense because his own lawyer is sick in the hospital, a motion continually refused by the judge, who wrongly links him to William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), whose calm, laid-back demeanor couldn’t be farther from the flamboyance of Kunstler, the attorney for the other 7 defendants, despite Kunstler’s repeated insistence that he does not represent Seale, who is eventually led out of the chambers where he is brutally beaten, shackled, and gagged, and brought back into the courtroom, where the prosecution requests a mistrial.  In truth this pattern continued for several days, with Seale continually making muffled sounds under his gag, before a mistrial was declared and Seale was removed from the case, but he was immediately imprisoned to serve four years for 16 counts of contempt of court.  It was a month after the mistrial when Fred Hampton was murdered.  Certainly one of the eye-openers of the trial was the degree that each defendant was undermined by an undercover cop assigned directly to them, befriending them, recording them, turning their words against them in the courtroom, which was also the case with Fred Hampton, as it led to his death.  This courtroom testimony revealed the presence of undercover FBI programs known as COINTELPRO, a secret spy operation against American citizens, used to target and smear Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders as well.  Despite this disinformation campaign designed to destroy reputations, Sorkin finds humor, inventing a situation where Jerry Rubin falls madly in love with his female undercover cop, still thinking wistfully about her even after she’s gone.  Similarly, Sorkin concocts an absurd scenario where Rubin and Hoffman accidentally run into Richard Schultz with his two young daughters, where Hoffman allegedly tells the girls “Your dad’s a good guy,” then telling Schultz, “We don’t have any beef with you.  We know you’re doing your job and you don’t think we’re criminals.”  Nothing could be further from the truth, as they were declared enemies, but in the liberal world of Hollywood, no divide is too large, as all fractured relationships can be healed.  Mirroring events of today, all the defendants of the trial would rage against the unethical practices of the FBI and systemic police brutality, decrying systemic racism in the criminal legal system, yet in Sorkin’s world it’s just a case of a few bad apples creating the appearance of rot, suggesting everything can be fixed.  It’s a cheap catharsis for naïve viewers.  One would have to ask, why did the government insist on burying the reports that confirmed most of the damage done in the 1968 Democratic convention disruptions was the result of excessive police violence, not the behavior of the protestors?  Or how could the blatant mistreatment of Bobby Seale happen in an American courtroom?  The hard truth is the system works as it was intended, repressing the existence of anyone who poses a threat to existing norms of wealth, property rights, and white advantages, where white supremacy has been entrenched into the status quo long before the Civil War.  Does anyone really think a few reforms can alter what hundreds of years have established as precedent?   Radicals in that era advocated a complete overthrow of the system.  Referring to the United States as Amerika, compiling detailed instructions on how to lead an armed struggle against the police, calling them “pigs,” Abbie Hoffman writes in his book, “We are not interested in the greening of Amerika, except for the grass that will cover its grave.”      

Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the ...  Afterword by Tom Hayden, from Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Seven, edited by Jon Wiener, 2006 (pdf)

Molly's Game

MOLLY’S GAME                 B+                  

USA  Chile  (140 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Aaron Sorkin          Official Site

Success is defined by being able to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

—Winston Churchill

Following a series of written projects that bring to life stories about influential people, like a U.S. Congressman’s influence over the Afghan War in CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR (2007), a portrait of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010), Billy Beane’s introduction of sabermetrics into baseball in Moneyball (2011), or the egomaniacal force behind computer innovator Steve Jobs (2015), Aaron Sorkin’s first directed film is largely a stream-of-conscious exposé where the inner narration reveals all, though better known as the brilliant screenwriter for David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) as well as the highly praised political television drama The West Wing (1999 – 2006).  Calling Fincher from time to time throughout the shoot for directing advice, Sorkin has a created a striking portrait of a highly confident and liberated woman, a fearless role model of sorts, though the film is largely about the male psyche, as she achieved her fame with an acute understanding of how to manage that psyche, skillfully manipulating the various pieces, like players on a chess board, creating the most exclusive high stakes poker games where only the elite are invited, including movie stars, hedge fund managers, big name athletes, Saudi princes, and other power brokers exchanging millions of dollars at the table, with one man losing $100 million dollars one night, paying up in full by the next day in order to be invited back to the next week’s game.  A film where the entitled character is based upon a strong fictional heroine from James Joyce’s groundbreaking 20th century novel Ulysses, among the more complex novels ever written, where her final monologue that concludes the book is one of the most powerful affirmations of life ever humanly imagined.  Born to a competitive and overcontrolling family where her father was a clinical psychologist, Molly became the third ranked American skier in the world with a chance of winning an Olympic medal in the Freestyle at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002 before a freak accident in the qualifying rounds knocked her out of the competition, while her younger brother was the #1 ranked skier in the world, World Champion by age 19, eventually drafted by an NFL football team, becoming the only known athlete to ever accomplish that feat.  Headed to Harvard Law School, which is the typical road to success, Molly (Jessica Chastain, who narrates throughout) takes a detour along the way following her accident, heading to the sunshine of Los Angeles, hoping to bathe in relaxation before heading to law school, but an interesting offer occurs along the way that literally changes her life, starting off as a cocktail waitress at LA’s Viper Room before she wis invited by the owner to host a poker game for Hollywood’s top celebrities, catering and managing for real estate club owner Darin Feinstein, aka Dean Keith’s (Jeremy Strong) high stakes basement poker game, listening in and learning everything she could about the game and how it works, eventually staking out her own turf in swank hotels where the buy-in entry fee per player is $250,000, often lost in just the first few hands in this freewheeling style of game.      

Convinced poker is not a game of chance, but a game of skill, she believed she was operating legally in the early 2000’s, never taking any money under the table or for any special favors, she ran an inscrutably clean operation, providing all the amenities, refusing offers from male admirers, where her reputation was built upon concealing the actual identities of those involved, whose names were later revealed in court depositions, including Toby Maguire as Player X (played by the baby-faced Michael Cera), who turns out to be sadistically ruthless, taking great pleasure in crushing and demoralizing losing players, but also Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alex Rodriguez, Dan Bilzerian, Macaulay Culkin, and Nick Cassavetes, as well as billionaires such as Alec Gores and Andy Beal, allowing them to continue their games unimpeded by outside forces.  While building what was ostensibly a man cave environment for some of the wealthiest and most successful men on the planet, Molly was providing an image of herself that projected positively with these men, dressing in short skirts and brazenly revealing outfits, deciding that in a world dominated by rich and powerful men, she would have to present herself in a sexually desirable way, as only then would they pay attention to her and take what she had to say seriously.  Basically what this indicates is that in a man’s world, society values women for their sexual desirability, where had Molly not been so attractive, perhaps none of this would ever have happened.  Nonetheless, doors opened that otherwise would never have opened for her, making plenty of money at an early age, much of it in tips, which lasted over the course of an entire decade.  Perhaps the untold secret to these games was finding players who were willing to play, in other words lose, to the regular sharks at the table, who were always looking for fresh meat they could devour.  That means rotating new players into the games who had a reasonable expectation that they could win, as nobody likes being made a fool of, though this was essentially the goal of the regulars where winning was not enough, as they had to crush their opponents.  Often they got arrogant and a bit big-headed, as did Keith after a string of losses, suggesting Molly was taking too much from him, basically changing the rules of the game midstream, putting her in a less favorable position, which gave her the impetus to start her own game.  Perhaps unsurprisingly she got the regulars to come along.  All of this success came to a screeching halt when she was arrested by the FBI in the middle of the night taking all of her assets in the process, literally forcing her to make a deal, like name names and come clean.  Only Molly refuses to do that and hires a high powered attorney instead, Idris Elba as Charlie Jaffey (actually Jim Walden, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scirica, also a former prosecutor who worked for 9 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York).  Jaffey hesitates before taking the case, intrigued by how well-versed she is on the charges and by her staunch refusal to give up names.               

Chastain and Elba are terrific together, as their high-powered interchanges are exceptional, providing most of the drama to the story, as they are playing out the various positions, including the government’s position as well as her own defense, where it’s clear Molly has turned down every opportunity to greedily profit from her position, leaving millions in debts unaccounted for, refusing to line her pockets, always dealing from a position of strength, which goes back to her childhood and the way she was raised.  Much of it told in flashback, the film creates a strong female persona rarely seen in films, constructed out of a series of moral choices that actually matter by the end, as that’s what she’s ultimately judged upon.  Chastain actually plays her character close to the vest, revealing as little as possible so as not to be seen as vulnerable or weak, offering sympathy and consolation to those in the midst of a downward spiral, actually becoming a voice of reason when the player has otherwise lost all perspective, all of which suggests a commitment not only to the game, but to those people playing in it, befriending them when they need it most.  This perspective is lost in the government’s case, but can be seen by viewers throughout the ongoing narrative, as she’s not a spiteful or selfish character, but thrives on being a professional as she can be.  After leaving LA when one player revolts against her, claiming she’s actually working for him, repeating almost exactly how Keith treated her, with men diminishing her importance, claiming only they have the power, and she’s only a minor character in “their” game.  By following Molly throughout, we’re able to see how conscientious she is, as opposed to the players, who can be viciously cruel.  This is largely a metaphor for how women are treated in this world, even at the highest levels, as men continue to think it’s all about them, single-mindedly thinking they make the game, allowing women to play in it on the periphery, but the huge sums of money are transferred exclusively from one man to the next, with no women allowed in their own inflated perception of power.  It’s interesting to see Sorkin write a feminist perspective in a patriarchal society, as it’s hardly an illusion, exposing a sexist way of thinking that is established from a man’s birthright.  While somewhat contrived, her father (Kevin Costner) comes back into the picture late in the film after Molly resurfaces under the verticality of Wall Street and New York, taking it to new heights, where she loses herself to drugs in order to stay afloat, keeping herself awake, then allowing her to sleep, which is the life of the super wealthy, like Prince or Michael Jackson, who died from the horrific consequences.  She enters that same territory, showing questionable judgment, allowing darker forces to enter her game, fronts for shadowy underworld figures, throwing everything off-kilter, losing all equilibrium to the power of money.  The Feds were never following her, but some of the disreputable players, where she was arrested as collateral damage in hopes of getting to them, but instead she decides to play by her own set of rules.  Altogether absent from this film, noticeably enough, is any hint of love or romance.  Based on a real life character who wrote her own book (that Sorkin adapts), her intriguing life story is more amazing than it seems, especially when considering all that was left out to protect the innocent.