Butler's Cinema Scene

Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin, John Carroll Lynch as David Dellinger, Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman

“THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7” My rating: A-

129 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In the year’s most fortuitous marriage of filmmaker and subject matter, Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” delivers a superbly scripted and acted mini-epic torn from recent American history.

Along the way it proves conclusively that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” natch) and based on real events of 1968-69, “Trial…” is packed with great moments and knockout perfs. Awe-inspiring in its ability to take a complex subject and examine it from myriad points of view, the film will leave viewers amused, infuriated and inspired.

That it also deals heavily in themes of  official misbehavior only makes it more relevant to a time in which the tools of government are routinely twisted to serve the corrupt whims of the White House.

Sorkin, who both scripted and directed, kicks things off with a kaleidoscopic sequence that explains, in superb cinematic shorthand, the philosophical differences among the various rabble rousers who will come to be known as the Chicago 7.

Middle-aged David Dellinger(John Carroll Lynch) is a suburban family man and literal scoutmaster preparing to go to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest the Vietnam War.  He’s so totally into non-violence that one of his legal team later admits: “You’re a conscientious objector who sat out World War II.  Even I want to punch you.”

In a similar vein, youthful activists Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis (Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp) plan peaceful protests in Chicago. They want to change society through the ballot box.

Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong of HBO’s “Succession”)  take a more anarchistic view. If punched, they claim, they’ll punch back. In the meantime, they’ll mock authority.

Finally there’s Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who tells us: “Martin’s dead. Malcolm’s dead. Bobby (Kennedy) is dead. Jesus is dead.  They tried it peacefully. We gonna try something else.”

One of Sorkin’s flashes of genius is to not show us the Chicago riots until later in the film, when we see them in flashbacks as testimony is delivered.

Instead the film jumps from the preparations for Chicago to the convention’s aftermath, when Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell (John Doman) orders U.S. attorney Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to indict the leading agitators for conspiring to cross state lines to incite riots against.  Schultz is a reluctant participant; though he has little in common with the men he will prosecute, he doubts the legitimacy of the government’s case. Nevertheless, he forges on.

Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden

While the behind-the-scenes meetings have been largely imagined by Sorkin, the trial scenes mostly are lifted from the actual transcripts.  Between the obviously prejudicial rulings and otherwise borderline dementia exhibited by Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) and the satirical political theater practiced by Rubin and Hoffman (the latter, when asked by the pissed-off judge if he was familiar with contempt of court, answered “It’s practically a religion with me, Sir”), the trial becomes a huge black comedy.

Less amusing is the fate of Bobby Seale, named as a defendant mostly out of spite (he was only in Chicago for a few hours during the convention but Mitchell wanted to put Black Power on trial). Seale was denied legal representation; his attorney had been hospitalized and Judge Hoffman refused to delay the trial until his recovery.  After continuously protesting this unfairness, Seale was gagged and shackled, a barbarian display that appalled even the prosecution. Eventually he was dropped as one of the defendants.

Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman

The film is absolutely packed with great performances.  Cohen, appropriately enough, steals his every scene as the scene-stealing Abbie (in another brilliant stroke, we see him post-trial doing his own version of standup for crowds of college kids). Redmayne digs deep into the conflicted Hayden, who hopes to channel his revolutionary efforts through legitimate means but at a key moment cannot tamp down his own anger.

Mark Rylance is a pillar of decency and legal creativity as William Kunstler, the chief defense lawyer. Michael Keaton had a fine late-act appearance as Ramsley Clark, LBJ’s attorney general who volunteers to testify on behalf of the 7.

And Langella’s Judge Hoffman is such a pompous doofus it’s all you can do not to scream at your TV set.

Even the minor roles — the cops who testify (and sometimes perjure themselves), peace workers, Kunstler’s staff members — are finely drawn.

In short, there’s enough wonderful stuff on display that “The Trial of the Chicago 7” will hold up under repeated viewings.

| Robert W. Butler