The Trial of the Chicago 7
Composite Score: 87.13
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, John Carroll Lynch, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Rylance, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, Danny Flaherty, Noah Robbins, John Doman, Michael Keaton, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and Caitlin FitzGerald
Director: Aaron Sorkin
Writer: Aaron Sorkin
Genres: Drama, History, Thriller, Courtroom
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some violence, bloody images, and drug use
Box Office: N/A
My take on Watching This Film:
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is Aaron Sorkin’s film about the trial of the many activists held responsible for the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago by the Nixon administration DOJ. The film stars an ensemble that includes Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, Alex Sharp as Rennie Davis, Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin, John Carroll Lynch as David Dellinger, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale, Mark Rylance as William Kunstler, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richard Schultz, and Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman. It examines the trial of the activist leaders and the events that led to their arrest, seeking to explain how everything exploded in the way that it did while also drawing striking parallels between 1968 and the world in the late 2010s and early 2020s. I would personally argue that it is the most 2020 film of the entire year, exploring concepts of police brutality and escalation, peaceful protest, corrupt government officials pursuing personal vendettas, and the slant of certain facets of the American justice system against exonerating those who don’t toe the party line. It received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Cohen.
For a while, the further removed we were from the film’s release, the more impact the film seemed to have had. Though it’s a film about leftist activists on trial for clashing with police at the DNC, most of its sentiments (and those spoken by the characters in Sorkin’s screenplay) resonate more powerfully with the stances of a modern liberal-centrist (typical of Sorkin), and that felt like the direction that the nation had shifted with the defeat of Donal Trump in the 2020 presidential election. My most recent watch of the film left me feeling far more frustrated with its lack of bite, struck by lingering statements about mollifying those who support the police, a fairly toothless climactic monologue from supposed instigator Abbie Hoffman about the power of peaceful protest, and even the presentation of JGL’s prosecutor Schultz as some kind of put-upon centrist rather than someone who continued prosecuting a trial that clearly had no standing in the name of a personal vendetta on the part of the newly elected government’s Justice Department. The performances by the ensemble are still fantastic, and the sense of challenge I felt at the end of the film remained incredibly powerful, but I wish that it chose to take stronger stances on issues of standing up to police, the interconnectedness of struggles for racial equality, social equality, environmentalism, and de-escalation of international hostilities, and even on condemning those in positions of government power who are or have become incompetent at their jobs, rather than just using them as comedy.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a powerfully acted film that reminds us of our duty to stand up for those who can’t stand for themselves, especially in the world we currently live in, certainly deserving of mention alongside great films. At the same time, its less divisive stances on certain issues leave its powerful central characters relatively defanged when it comes to making strong statements that could otherwise galvanize a modern audience to action against those who are reminiscent of the film’s villains. If you’d like to catch the film for yourself, you can find it to stream on Netflix.
