The Trial Of The Chicago 7
Great screenwriting and acting but fall short in other areas.
Aaron Sorkin is one of the most successful screenwriters working in Hollywood today, and for good reason. He is an incredible writer whose style of storytelling is incredibly engaging and his style of dialogue is unrivaled. Dialogue is what Sorkin Does best and one of the best genres to showcase this is the courtroom drama.
That’s why when I heard that Sorkin had a new courtroom drama out with a cast as good as this I couldn’t help but be excited and for the most part, the trial of the Chicago 7 doesn’t disappoint.
The film is about The Trial Of the Chicago 7, a real trial that took place in 1969. Pitting the United States Government against Seven defendants charged with conspiracy, arising from the countercultural protests in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
The premise of the film is very interesting, and the story is still relevant today, especially in 2020 after the large number of protests and showings of police brutality we have seen this year. Being this film is a courtroom drama, it spends a large amount of time on the actual trial itself. I loved this because once the trial gets going, I was on the edge of my seat, watching as more new information about the events was revealed through Sorkin’s magnificent writing.
The film oscillates between courtroom scenes and correlating flashback scenes, giving the film a very engaging structure that allowed us to see more than just the courtroom for 2 hours. The constant switching back and forth acted as a breather for the audience from the intense questioning in the courtroom however I would be lying if I said there weren’t a few moments where I wished we could just return to the courtroom.
Sorkin is at his best when the characters are snapping back and forth at each other in the courtroom with these captivating, humorous, and memorable fast witted lines. The dialogue in the courtroom really drives this film forward.
However, when the characters are interacting with each other outside of the courtroom I lost interest because they felt like what they were. Characters, rather than people. Very little is done to explore who any of these people are at their core and why they do or say what they do. Some characters are well developed however a few just feel like ideas for characters that were never really fleshed out. I can only say I understood Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale because the rest of the cast did feel somewhat one-note.
Speaking of Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale, they’re both brilliantly acted. This film has a great cast, everyone here does a good job barre a few odd accents however the two that really stole the show were Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale. Abbie provides a lot of the comic relief in this film, and as you’d expect, Sacha handles this perfectly because he’s just a really funny guy. However, he also does a great job of showing the other side of Abbie. The side he usually covers up with jokes and humour. When Abbie has to get serious about the situation and what’s happening you really feel for him. You understand that he is someone who is just trying to help people and he’s a lot more than the clown character he is seen as.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Bobby Seale who is the odd one out of the group. In fact, he isn’t even a part of the group. He was falsely accused of murder and now he is being roped into a conspiracy case with a bunch of people he’s never met. To top it all off, the judge is constantly prejudiced against him, to the extent that he won’t even let him have his lawyer to represent Him. Understandably so, Seale is pissed. He is angry at the institutions that run the country for treating him as badly as they have and He outwardly shows this anger and annoyance constantly throughout the trial and you believe it but you truly feel it in the climax of his story.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Perfectly plays a man that has been beaten down so much that he simply doesn’t care about the consequences anymore. I was angered by what happened to him because it was so outrageously unfair and I couldn’t help but feel this way because Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s performance begs for your sympathy, better yet, demands it.
You may have noticed I’ve lauded Sorkin as an amazing screenwriter however I haven’t touched upon his directing skills, mainly because I don’t think they’re very good. The Social Network works so well because not only is the film an amazingly written story but it is also an amazingly shot and directed film.
This, however, is far from that. This film is a boring brick wall to look at. This may be excusable if there was more going on but since this is a film that takes place in very few locations, The film's unimaginative cinematography shines as one of the worst aspects of the film. Which is sad because I quite liked the cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael’s work on Le Mans 66.
Anyone who’s taken a film class or just heard some of the greats speak on filmmaking will know that the location, how it’s shot, and everything in the shot can elevate a film from something basic to something amazing. This advice seems to be lost on Sorkin because my god was the location completely spiritless. Nothing was done to make the location itself interesting. The camera was simply there conveying the story in a series of basic camera shots that any director could have achieved. Sorkin’s scripts feel like something only he can write, however, sadly his films don’t feel the same.
In the end, the great parts of this film are really great. This film is a great showing of spectacular screenwriting and some stunning acting however apart from these two elements, the film falls short of being something amazing. Alfred Hitchcock Once said “If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on” and sadly if you did the same with this movie, you’d realise that without its script it’s almost nothing. Sorkin can write like nobody else but he still seems to misunderstand how to utilise films' greatest tool. The Camera.
