The Trial of the Chicago 7: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Yikes. What an abysmal Sorkinian shitshow.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, recounts the story of the infamous prosecution of a group of famed anti-Vietnam war protestors arrested for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Among the star-studded ensemble are Sacha Baron Cohen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Mark Rylance and Frank Langella.

The film, which is streaming on Netflix, has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Sacha Baron Cohen).

The Trial of the Chicago 7 tells an extremely important story, but unfortunately, it is an abysmally crafted, relentlessly hackneyed shitshow of a movie.

One can only speculate as to why such an aggressively trite cinematic venture has been so well received.

Maybe people say they like this movie because they think this is the type of movie they’re supposed to like. In this way The Trial of the Chicago 7 is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln in that It covers a “serious” historical topic meant to convey a noble truth about a current social political issue. Lincoln was a terrible movie too, but that didn’t stop critics from fawning over it during their Obama sugar high. It was like critics endorsed the film in an attempt to avoid seeming to be against the abolition of slavery - as inane as that sounds.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is like baby boomer porn where Sorkin and his fellow boomers can signal their historic virtue all over themselves in a frantic fit of masturbatorial self-righteousness. The film allows the auto-erotic boomer fantasy to extend to current issues and protests movements like Black Lives Matter, with climax no doubt gushing forth accompanied by an orgasmic cry of “right side of history!”

Regardless (or as Dictionary.com would now say - ‘irregardless’) of why it is being praised, it is definitely being praised. At the website Rotten Tomatoes the film currently has a 90% critical score and a 91% audience score.

It is at times like these that I feel the world has officially lost its mind. .

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is so cinematically cliched, dramatically defective and pretentiously pedantic it feels like a two hour and ten minute SNL skit.

The film boasts some of the most embarrassing acting of the year. Sacha Baron Cohen is nominated for a Best Supporting Actor for his work as 60’s icon Abbie Hoffman. Cohen looks like a dad who dressed up in in a bad hippie costume to accompany his kids to a Halloween dance. It is painfully embarrassing watching the 49 year old Cohen play acting as the 30 year-old Hoffman. Adding to the suck is the fact that Cohen absolutely tears limb from limb Hoffman’s unique New England accent, and ends up sounding like Borat, a Brooklynite, Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and a posh Brit all rolled into one giant acting shit sandwich.

Eddie Redmayne is just as dreadful as Tom Hayden. Redmayne is a charisma-less acting vampire that drains every scene of even the most remote bit of life. He too mauls an American accent like a newly freed Vegas tiger seeking revenge on his life-long tormentors Siegfried and Roy.

Even Mark Rylance, the great Mark Rylance, churns out a sub-par performance. Rylance plays the iconic civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who was one of the great New York characters of all-time. Rylance’s Kunstler is so far removed from any version of reality as to be criminal. Rylance too never properly wields Kunstler’s distinctive New York dialect. But as my friend Mo Danger pointed out, to Rylance’s credit he at least seems like the only actor in the cast not in on the Sorkinian joke.

The Trial of the Chicago 7’s biggest problem though is the direction of Aaron Sorkin, who simply lacks the requisite cinematic skill to take on such sprawling and complex subject matter.

Sorkin’s ham-fisted, hit-all-the-bullet-points, broad brush, watered down approach drains the dynamic story of any dramatic power. His limp direction also leaves his actors floundering, unable to piece together performances with any dramatic coherence.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is like a very special episode of Sorkin’s 90’s remake of Fantasy Island …The West Wing. It is so self-reverential, pandering and dramatically flaccid as to be egregiously cinematically inept.

The piece de resistance of The Trial of the Chicago 7 is that it builds to a cinematic climax where people unironically stand and clap in a courtroom. It’s like Sorkin went all meta and made a movie set in the 1960’s that had the dramatic sensibilities of a high school drama from the 1980’s.

The story of the Chicago 7 is one that needs to be told…maybe in a Netflix mini-series so as to give each character more depth and the conflagration in Chicago in 1968 more context. The Trial of the Chicago 7 fails to adequately recount the time, place, events and characters involved in one of the crazier and more dangerous times in American history, and that failure is entirely on Aaron Sorkin.

My advice is to either skip The Trial of the Chicago 7 or go all in and just hate watch the damn thing, because it is certainly a target rich environment for scorn and cathartic loathing. Either way, this movie is a blight on the cinema landscape and can’t be forgotten soon enough.

©2021

The Theory of Everything: A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS NO SPOILERS!! REPEAT…THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

The Theory of Everything, directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire, Project Nim), is the story of famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, his wife Jane, his battle with motor neuron disease and her efforts to care for him. The film, written by Anthony McCarten, is based upon Jane Hawking's memoir "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen".

The film stars Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking. Redmayne's performance as Hawking is worth noting. He does an incredible job morphing himself into Hawking physically. He looks uncannily like the famed genius as he shrivels and contorts in his wheelchair at the mercy of this awful disease that ravages his body. I can't help but think though, that The Theory of Everything should have been called The Imitation Game because Redmayne's performance seems more like an imitation than acting. When I was a young man (or at least younger man) studying acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, I had a very interesting discussion with one of the phenomenal teachers there one day about the predicament and potential difficulties of playing an actual, well-known person. This teacher said something that has stayed with me ever since, she said, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the least sincere form of acting". I mean, if imitation was acting, Frank Caliendo and Rich Little would have trophy cases filled with Oscars, but it isn't and they don't. This teacher's voice kept ringing in my ears as I watched The Theory of Everything. This is not entirely Redmayne's fault though. The script is so two-dimensional that, like a black hole, no light, or life, or genuine humanity can survive in it. So Redmayne's obvious hard work is all for nought, and his physical transformation rings hollow because there is no authentic life within in the script.

Felicity Jones does as well as she can with what she is given, and is an extremely appealing presence throughout the film, but again she is terribly short changed by an underwhelming script. She does bring an unmistakable charisma to every scene she inhabits though, and I very much look forward to seeing her work with more substantial material than this in the future.

Visually, the film uses a minimalist approach in trying to convey the big, complex thoughts on time and space that made Hawking such a world famous figure. For example, using the spinning cream in a cup of coffee as a visual cue for Hawking to think of the vastness of the universe and how it all could have started. I think this approach is a fatal error for the film. The story of Hawking would have been much better served if they had chosen to make a film in the vein of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which would tell Hawking's story by using the medium of film to it's fullest advantage by showing us Hawking's unique view of the world, through his eyes. It also would be a great opportunity to use film for it's greatest strength, the ability to show us something that we can only imagine, and barely at that, the big bang and the beginning and expansion of the universe. Instead we get visuals that are flat, ordinary and stale, as is the storytelling.

After the film ended my friend, the inimitable Lady Pumpernickle-Dussledorf, looked up Stephen Hawking on wikipedia and after reading commented, "Stephen Hawking's wikipedia page has more dramatic tension than that entire movie". Wise woman that Lady Pumpernickle-Dussledorf. The most frustrating thing about the film, is that there is such rich source material there, if only someone had the courage to really delve into it. Hawking is a fascinating character, and his life is beyond remarkable, so to have his story reduced into the most pedestrian and simplistic of films is irritating if not downright maddening.

As is often the case with biopics, and is most definitely the case with biopics this year, making a film about someone still alive or someone whom people have a direct interest in protecting their legacy, is a sure fire way to make an ordinary, mundane and dull film. Examples of biopics this year being artistically constricted by people with a vested interest looking over the filmmakers shoulders include but are not limited to,  Foxcatcher and American Sniper. I have written before about the difficulty of this situation for actors, directors and writers, in two previous posts, The Great Man Theory and the Dangers of Deification Part One, and The Great Man Theory and the Dangers of Deification Part Two. Sadly, I think both of those posts hold relevancy for The Theory of Everything, which is another in the long line of films to fall prey to the dangers of deification.

In conclusion, The Theory of Everything is an ordinary film about a very extraordinary man. It is nothing more than a paint by numbers, standard biopic. There is no life, no energy and most importantly no humanity in the entire film. A life like Stephen Hawking's deserves better, and so do we.

© 2015

FOR REVIEWS OF OTHER FILMS RELEASED DURING THE HOLIDAY SEASON, PLEASE CLICK ON THESE LINKS TO WHIPLASH , BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE) , FOXCATCHER , WILD , AMERICAN SNIPER , THE IMITATION GAME , A MOST VIOLENT YEAR , NIGHTCRAWLER , STILL ALICE , INHERENT VICE , SELMA , MR. TURNER , CAKE .