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)

The Theory of Everything

U.S. President Barack Obama talks with Stephen Hawking in the White House before presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 12, 2009 

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING       B-                 

Great Britain  (123 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  James Marsh 

Biographical profiles (biopics) do not typically make for great cinema, even when well regarded by critics, as instead they tend to be showpieces for great acting performances, through some films can transcend the genre, where the performances anchor more complicated works like Scorsese’s RAGING BULL (1980), Michael Apted’s COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER (1980), Jim Sheridan’s MY LEFT FOOT (1989), Bennett Miller’s CAPOTE (2005), or James Mangold’s WALK THE LINE (2005).  This does not fall into that distinguished company, largely because the source material is Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen, the 2007 memoir by Stephen Hawking’s wife Jane, so the portrait isn’t so much about physics or the celebrated scientist, but instead describes what it was like to care for someone attempting to cope with such a grave disability.  However, due to the larger than life persona of Hawking, one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, where his lifelong quest, much like Einstein before him, has been to explain the meaning of the universe, his stature overshadows and literally dwarfs what this picture has to offer.  As an incomplete picture of Hawking himself, concentrating more on the long suffering wife, it’s all about the performances, with Eddie Redmayne, from Hick (2011), My Week with Marilyn (2011), and LES MISÉRABLES (2012) as Hawking, and Felicity Jones from Like Crazy (2011), as his wife Jane.  It’s the first major film where the young actors have been allowed starring roles, both literally carrying the picture with Oscar worthy performances.  Like Daniel Day-Lewis portraying an artist with cerebral palsy, learning to write and paint with his only controllable limb, his left foot, Redmayne is near miraculous in his stunning display of physicality, even as he spends half the film in a wheelchair, expressing the deteriorating effects of motor neuron disease, otherwise known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, where the average survival rate even today is only three or four years, as most die of respiratory failure.  When Hawking was diagnosed in 1963 at the age of 21, he was given 2 years to live, yet is miraculously still alive today, even posting about the film on social media, though he is almost entirely paralyzed and communicates through an electronic speech-generating device.

Stephen Hawking Tells Us What He Really Thinks Of 'The Theory of Everything'  Laura Rosenfeld from Tech Times, November 19, 2014: 

I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well in The Theory of Everything Movie. He spent time with ALS sufferers so he could be authentic. At times, I thought he was me.

Seeing the film has given me the opportunity to reflect on my life. Although I'm severely disabled, I have been successful in my scientific work. I travel widely and have been to Antarctica and Easter Island, down in a submarine and up on a zero gravity flight. One day I hope to go into space.

I've been privileged to gain some understanding of the way the universe operates through my work. But it would be an empty universe indeed without the people that I love.

Despite the brilliance of a continually disfigured Redmayne in a performance that reportedly made the celebrated scientist cry, though a showcase of the most heartbreaking moments of one’s life might have a tendency to do that, not to be overshadowed, Felicity Jones is a marvel of inner strength and determination herself, where her character knows what she’s getting into when she meets Hawking in 1963 and still chooses to marry him and take care of this man almost single handedly.  The film is as much about her selfless resolve and her devotion to duty in dealing with such a severe disability, where the film is more about their marriage than anything having to do with science.  While the audience sees early signs of brilliance from Hawking, there’s no reason to believe that Jane saw him as anything more than simply a man she fell in love with and married, where in the film she seems more concerned about his religious beliefs than his scientific accomplishments.  Adapted from the second memoir of Jane Hawking by Anthony McCarten, which is an abridged reworking of her original 1999 memoir, Music to Move the Stars:  A Life with Stephen, this is unfortunately the root of the film’s problems, as the perspective is simply too narrow and the focus too ordinary, turning this into a typical Hollywood tearjerker that magnifies the personal struggles at the expense of learning more about Hawking’s place in the scientific community.  When it was released the book was considered scandalous, as Hawking by that time was an avowed celebrity, worshipped throughout the entire world, where his success was considered a triumph over his disability, but until the publication and huge success of A Brief History of Time in 1988, selling more than 5 million copies, translated into 33 different languages, for the previous 25-years, Jane spent most of that time in the back-breaking labor of caring for an invalid husband while raising three children, described in her book as living under the “tyranny” of his disability (she nicknamed him “the puppeteer” and “the emperor”), as the Hawkings were financially strapped and dependent on others, including the MacArthur Foundation, for the exorbitant costs connected to his medical care.  During this time Jane received little support, encouragement, or recognition for the sacrifices she was making.  Her book was viewed in the media with skeptical negativity for bringing these dirty details into light, where her candor was not appreciated, but after 1989, his book and other projects brought in huge sums of money, which finally made Hawking a wealthy man and more than likely played a large role in the collapse of their marriage.   

Among the sources of conflict between them was religion, as Jane was a fervent believer while he was an atheist, his family (barely seen in the movie) was never fond of Jane and were reportedly never nice to her, and while she sacrificed to provide for his every need, he would isolate himself from his family where he could be devoted to physics.  The mounting pressures on Jane’s shoulders are the real focus of the film, where it was her mother’s advice to find an outlet of her own, suggesting she sing in the church choir, which brings her a certain amount of solace, where she meets Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox) as the choirmaster, who recently lost his wife to illness and develops a close relationship with Jane and the rest of the Hawking family in the 1980’s, helping provide a certain stability to an otherwise out of control situation.  Yet as Jane keeps having children, rumors persist, even within Jane’s own family, about who is the actual father, where it’s hard to believe it could be Stephen, yet surprisingly this function remains “automatic,” as he describes it, which is a bit amazing considering the extreme degree of his physical paralysis.  For decades, Hawking ignored his physical deterioration, exerting all his focus into his intellectual pursuits, where one of the psychological impacts of the disease is a detached overcompensation of the intellectual at the expense of that part of the brain that processes emotional development.  Marsh is a visually fluid director, where perhaps the most attractive cinematic techniques on display are the highly colorful video flashback sequences, which are like happy memories as seen through home movies.  By 1990, however, Stephen decides to leave Jane and live in America with his nurse, Elaine Mason (Mazine Peake), who was married at the time, but they later married, all but discontinuing contact with Jane.  Soon afterwards, the house and garden the family had shared in Cambridge were torn down, where according to Jane, “I felt it had all been taken away from me…I was absolutely committed to the marriage and would never have ended it.  When we first knew each other he was very funny and very engaging, and I had great faith.  I was so positive about Stephen fulfilling his genius.”  Ironically, left out of the film was Stephen’s eventual separation and divorce from Elaine as well in 2006, following which Hawking resumed closer relationships with Jane, his children, and grandchildren.  The film, based upon the revised memoir written in 2007, actually reflects their happier period together. 

While Hawking, through his study of black holes, is the first to bring together ideas of quantum mechanics and gravitation in an enlightening and consistently provocative manner, something that will be a matter of discussion for years to come, his disease-related physical deterioration continues to progress, and by 2005 he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles, with a rate of about one word per minute, and by 2009 he could no longer drive his electronic wheelchair, where the fear is he will fall into complete paralysis, or locked-in syndrome.  He has increased breathing difficulties, sometimes requiring a ventilator, and has been hospitalized several times.  For 90% of ALS patients, every second of every minute can be a living hell, where many die of respiratory failure or commit suicide by refusing to have a tracheotomy.  The film shows how family members can be tricked and/or persuaded to make the decision for the patient not to have a tracheotomy, often at the advice of medical professionals, though this treads on dangerous moral and ethical grounds, and may even be considered a crime.

Hick

HICK                          D                    

USA  (95 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Derick Martini                        Official Trailer

You may not want to hear things that make you uncomfortable. But if you just allow girls to be more than one thing, not just virgins, not just whores, not just princesses, not just basket-cases, not just hot chicks, if you just allow us to be, say, human…you might just learn something.      —Andrea Portes (author of Hick)

Rarely has a film with a cast this good sputtered so badly, where one can only place blame with the director, whose previous film LYMELIFE (2009) was another dialog driven work aided by excellent performances.  Adapted by the author, Andrea Portes, from her first novel, there’s plenty of sharp dialog here written from a teen perspective, though it’s undermined by the crudeness of the characters and much of what was probably meant for humor gets lost in a whirlwind of white trash caricatures that thrive on the worst of human nature.  Ultimately this retreats into a horribly misguided and ugly mess, where were it not for the stars, this film should never have been released.  What was probably imagined as a kind of fatal attraction simply never gets started in this amour fou.  At the center of this storm is Chloë Grace Moretz, from HUGO (2011), LET ME IN (2009) and KICK-ASS (2009), an adorable, somewhat pouty young actress who has her work cut out for her, as she’s literally in every shot, also providing an inner voiceover narration and personal drawings as well, all offering insight into her thirteen-year old soul which is just getting started in life.  Moretz, herself, is charming, but no one else is, so she’s left on her own offering a spirited performace that drifts through a wasteland of aimlessness.  The child of two barnstorming drunks, Juliette Lewis and Anson Mount, both inseparable, locked in a tortured marriage, spending their lives arguing, getting wasted and having sex, while Luli (Moretz) survives the chaos existing on small fantasies and macaroni and cheese while drawing colorful pictures of a better life somewhere else, thinking anywhere is better than the dead-end life of rural Nebraska.  It doesn’t take much prodding for her to head for the open road the day after her 13th birthday, carrying with her a Smith and Wesson .45 given to her by her uncle.  Known for her flippant attitude and fast mouth, she’s something of a smart aleck who has survived by being a bigger pain in the ass than those deadbeats and losers around her, creating needed space for herself where she can be on her own.

Heading for Las Vegas, she may as well be heading for Nome, Alaska, as she never gets very far, finding life on the road filled with despicable characters all pretending to be on her side.  Putting up a strong front, she encounters a gimp-legged cowboy named Eddie (Eddie Redmayne), whose pathetic attempts at country charm only provoke crude descriptions of what she plainly thinks of him, expressed in a firebrand of foul mouthed invectives, where she’d rather walk than spend another minute with this loser, so she exits gracelessly.  Not to be deterred, she manages to get a ride with Glenda (Blake Lively), played as a red-haired coke sniffer whose idea of petty cash is whatever she can steal from the next cash register.  Using Luli as bait, the plan works perfectly, only the store clerk drops dead on the spot when Luli goes into her pretend seizure routine, meant only as a distraction, but apparently it was too much.  Glenda takes Luli under her wing, arriving soon enough at the home of a friend, an upscale Texas rancher, Lloyd (Ray McKinnon), a mean and quick-tempered lowlife who gets off degrading and humiliating others.  But it’s here that she meets Eddie again, as he’s working for Lloyd, where one might think fate is bringing them back together.  But they get along no better this time than they did before, still the same nervous lout he was in the beginning, though here he displays even creepier motives, cowardly using Luli as an enticement to settle a losing bet in a pool hall, and then when she’s half raped, he barges in like a bat out of hell to supposedly rescue her.  Despite all attempts to establish some chemistry between them, Eddie is too far off his rocker to be of any interest to anyone.  When he gets all liquored up, full of himself with his newly won prize, ready to reap the reward in some cheap motel for rescuing the fair damsel in distress, the story only gets more wretched, though there is an all too brief reprise with Rory Culkin that allows Luli to glow before she gets sucked into the darkness. 

What’s particularly distressing here is how the dark themes that inspired the book are treated with such a clumsy and heavy-handed manner here, where the story escalates into predictably unsavory territory without any of Luli’s spunk and personal flair for self-preservation that opened the film.  Despite more degrading horrors that lie in store for her, don’t think for a minute that she is beaten down or defeated, but the tone of the film fails to register with her interior moods and growing sense of independence, and instead uses stale and typically predictable country ballads and Dylan anthems that she probably never heard to express open road themes.  But despite being a road journey where the unknown lies around every bend, this film is terribly out of synch and dwells far too long on the ugly and awkwardly uncomfortable moments of a sick and twisted man’s rape fantasies.  This is as far removed from her drawings and voiceover narration as you can get, and the director does nothing to link or connect these polar opposites.  Luli is seen from the outset as a young girl that rails with a sense of personal pride and growing sense of independence, funny, always curious, with a keen intelligence, yet remains fragile and unsure of herself in this godforsaken world, needing love and guidance and something that she can hold on to, but this director has all but abandoned her perky wit and humor and instead allows Eddie’s disgustingly sick mentality to dominate and destroy the picture.  Even if little is graphically shown, nothing good can come from what the director reveals.  The headstrong and precocious girl with the snarky tone, she’s worth spending time with, her wounded life is worth exploring, not the psychopath that probably belongs in another movie who unfortunately takes center stage.  Initially Colin Farrell (as Eddie) and Kirsten Dunst (as Glenda) were slated to make the film, and perhaps things might have been different, but this is a film unworthy of the performance Moretz gives, that instead feels dirty and contaminated.