The Trial of the Chicago Seven

Or: The Drag Oar

How could I fall so deeply for Jerry Rubin? In Aaron Sorkin’s the Trial of the Chicago Seven, Rubin (Jeremy Strong), sidekick to Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), bumbles along, offering soft spoken protests in a polite murmur and generally a stoned fugue, yet remaining an air of honorable principal in the madness and danger of the counter cultural set.

He’s also an unfilled point that gleams brightly in the midst of Sorkin’s solid, workman like script and shines all the brighter for it. I preferred Chicago Seven to Sorkin’s other recent offerings (The Social Network a grim but rarified fable; Moneyball, who even remembers what happened?) but the ins and outs of its story, documenting the 1968 Chicago riots and the political trial that came after, is for once a little two polished. Like a good court drama we get a full report of the events of 68 from various speakers on the ground, Protestor or Police (including bits of Abbie doing stand up some years after the fact, a welcome but strange addition), but the story around it is just a tad touch too genteel. Sorkin’s signature wit never gets to comes to react with mental chaos, except of course in dear, dear Jerry.

Another high point is Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), not to be confused with Abby, the self-satisfied and slightly unstable judge. Obviously hostile to the seven “traitors” before him, Langella keeps up a steady ooze of snide and almost oblivious malice. If you’ve ever worked a retail job, and ever had to wait upon a customer mummified in his own entitlement, Langella will provoke a deliciously visceral reaction.

The movie is at its best in the confines of the courtroom, the mental battles between Defense Attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance, international treasure), with his rich gravel bed voice repeatedly raked over by fury, and the pressed and polished Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) the federal prosecutor who is increasingly disturbed by the demands his bosses put on winning rather than justice. It’s less sure of foot in the in the snide battles between Abbie and his straighter-laced brother-in arms Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne). The quips and digs are good, but the struggle behind it lacks purchase.

The principal problem is that there’s so much to cover that a lot of the story gets lost and one of the most important pieces that gets planted in the shade is Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), national chairman of the Black Panther Party. It’s hard to put Bobby into the story because he was literally lumped into the trial (wasn’t even at the riot, kept sequestered in a federal prison while the white defenders gather under house arrest, denied access to his lawyer, and didn’t want any thing to do with the so-called “Chicago Seven” in the first place). Still Abdul-Mateen II in his few scenes is magnetic and wish we would have given him more opportunities to show the more life and death grip of the day and age. As he says at once, with glacial anger to Tom, the Yippies and the SDS’s protests are a lot different from “A rope on a tree.”

The Trial of the Chicago Seven is well made and moving, its ending sinking just right and the Sorkinese as bright and pointed as ever (“I think the insitutiitions of our democracy are wonderful things, that right now are populated by some terrible people.” Hoo ba). But it’s a little too air tight, perhaps for the present moment. I wish we could see it gasp a bit more. Thankfully we have Jerry Rubin and his egg, perpetually lost, and pharmaceutically jury-rigged, dangling from a crippled ship of state trying to beat back to a true corse.