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- ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ Review: Aaron Sorkin’s Counterculture Docudrama Is a Knockout — the Rare Profound Movie About the 1960s Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Redmayne lead a superb ensemble in a dramatization of the infamous circus of a '60s conspiracy trial, which Sorkin makes as charged and relevant today as it was then.
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Sep 25, 2020 · ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ Review: Aaron Sorkin’s Counterculture Docudrama Is a Knockout — the Rare Profound Movie About the 1960s Reviewed at Digital Arts, Sept.23, 2020. MPAA Rating: R...
- The Chicago Seven
- Bobby Seale
- The Prosecution
- The Defense
- John Mitchell and Ramsey Clark
- The Judge
Abbie Hoffman
Comedian and inveterate prankster Sacha Baron Cohen gives one of the film’s most memorable performances as Youth International Party co-founder and inveterate prankster Abbie Hoffman.* Cohen did a great job of channeling Hoffman, as you can see by comparing this clip of Hoffman at one of his many midtrial press conferences to the re-creation in the film: Hoffman and Jerry Rubin really did wear judicial robes to court one day, drawing the ire of the judge (Frank Langella), and according to Rub...
Jerry Rubin
Rubin (Jeremy Strong), who co-founded the Yippies, shows up in The Trial of the Chicago 7 as an amiable but not very articulate stoner. It’s easy to find footage of Rubin in a similar mode—e.g., his 1970 interview with Dorothy Fuldheim—but he could turn a phrase when he wanted to. It was Rubin, for example, who referred to the trial as the “Academy Award of protest”: Sorkin’s script doesn’t have much room for Rubin to be clever, so he gives a version of that line to Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins)....
Tom Hayden
Sorkin gives National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam activist Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) an important structural role in his screenplay that isn’t entirely true to life: Hayden serves as a stand-in for liberals who are sympathetic to social causes but think prankish protesters like the Yippies went too far. When Abbie Hoffman asks Hayden what his problem with him is, Hayden replies with this stirring speech about respectability politics: That does not seem to be how Tom Hay...
Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who co-founded the Black Panther Party along with Huey P. Newton, was involved in the first stages of the trial before his case was severed from the other seven defendants’ on Nov. 5, 1969. He was treated just as horribly in real life as he is in the film. During the pretrial, Seale was represented by a group of...
The government’s prosecutors on the case were Thomas Foran (J.C. MacKenzie) and Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Sorkin goes out of his way to make Schultz a little more sympathetic than Foran. In Sorkin’s telling, Schultz pushes back when John Mitchell (John Doman) suggests prosecuting the case (possible but unlikely), Schultz moves to seve...
William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass (Ben Shenkman) served as counsel for the defense, and their demeanors and legal maneuvering are portrayed more or less accurately during the trial. The film downplays how much of a circus the defense’s case was: Celebrity witnesses included Allen Ginsberg, William Styron, Dick Gregory, Judy Collins, Timothy Le...
The Trial of the Chicago 7 implies that part of the reason the defendants were charged at all was because incoming Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell was mad at outgoing Johnson Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton) for submitting his resignation letter only an hour before Mitchell was to be confirmed. Although we couldn’t locate the act...
Casting Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman was Sorkin’s greatest stroke of genius, because the real Judge Hoffman spoke in Frank Langella dialogue, all stern admonitions and haughty dismissals. As unbelievable as it seems, Judge Hoffman, born in 1895, really did act with the malice shown in the film, dismissing objections from the defense befor...
- Matthew Dessem
Oct 16, 2020 · The film depicts the 1969 Chicago Seven trial, in which President Nixon’s federal government charged eight anti-Vietnam war activists with conspiring to incite a riot at the previous year’s...
At the sentencing in the film, Tom Hayden, played by Eddie Redmayne, uses his allotted time to speak to read off the names of the U.S. soldiers who had died in Vietnam since the trial began.
Oct 15, 2020 · On October 29, 1969, Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party and one of eight co-defendants standing trial for inciting the riots that erupted at Chicago's 1968 Democratic National...
Sorkin wastes no time throwing viewers into the chaos of 1968, introducing viewers to the key players in what would become known as the trial of the Chicago 7 as they plan their trip to the Windy City to protest the Vietnam War during the Democratic National Convention.
Sep 25, 2020 · The Chicago 7 trial was a circus, an outsize burlesque of a trial, yet it was also a deeply serious battle over who can say what — and how — in America.
