Review: Trial of the Chicago 7 (Patreon)

Aaron Sorkin sure writes polished propaganda for the American state. This was pretty good up until the last fifteen minutes: well-structured, brisk, snappy, and fun. Sorkin's techniques of tricking viewers into thinking they're smart still work. He's packed a substantive (if intensely skewed) amount of historical material into a tightly assembled drama that most Hollywood screenwriters only jerk off to while writing The Imitation Game or some other comphet agitprop. Clearly cocaine wasn't the only thing motivating Aaron Sorkin through four seasons of The West Wing, even if his eventual sobriety was the worst crime ever perpetrated against the American public. As far as liberal bullshit whose response to "read the room" is "I have, it's a really nice room" goes, this is about as well as that particular Caucasian subgenre does in 2020.

Considering what prolix librettist wrote it, Trial of the Chicago 7 is surprisingly non-adversarial towards its titular collective. The movie genuinely respects the Chicago Seven's antiwar politics front and center, particularly in its opening sequence which intercuts dramatic footage and vintage news reports to depict the Johnson administration's deployment of gobsmacking numbers of troops (an amount exceeded only by the number of times LBJ whipped out his penis in the Oval Office). Tom Hayden (sadly played by Eddie /vomits/ Redmayne) tell Students for a Democratic Society that electoral politics in the form of Humphrey won't end the war in Vietnam. The fact these people were leftists is remarkably uncondemned by the screenplay.

Unsurprisingly, this respect is paid for with bowdelerization. Sorkin has never met a leftist in his life, so he writes Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as Chapo Trap House for the 13 people who liked The Newsroom. The crux of the Chicago Seven's protest isn't about the mass slaughter of Vietnamese civilians but a paean to Our Boys in Vietnam. There's a fucking scene where the defendants stand in respectful silence for a TV broadcast listing slain American soldiers. And one where Abbie Hoffman defends American institutions and refers to elections as peaceful revolutions. And Tom Hayden ends the movie with a reading of dead soldiers' names. 

Actually fuck this movie. Fuck it to hell. Forget the first paragraph.