'The Trial of the Chicago 7' Review Thread

Rotten Tomatoes: 90% (30 reviews) with 8.26 in average rating

Metacritic: 74/100 (18 critics)

As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie.

Sorkin has made a movie that's gripping, illuminating and trenchant, as erudite as his best work and always grounded first and foremost in story and character. It's as much about the constitutional American right to protest as it is about justice, which makes it incredibly relevant to where we are today, and to what's at stake in the coming election. The final note of defiance here offers a glimmer of hope for which many of us are starved right now. I'll take it.

-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Made by Paramount and tossed to Netflix in the pandemic uncertainty of 2020, “Chicago 7” isn’t exactly a groundbreaking vision, but it’s certainly a passion project of the “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” variety. It could have been made a few years after the Chicago 7 faced their fate and fit its moment, but registers as particularly robust now: Sorkin proves that courtrooms have always been at the mercy of a flawed process, yet subject to moral scrutiny at every turn. A look back at rabble-rousers from another era won’t change the world, but “Chicago 7” is a solid tribute to a few men who realized they could, even when the system they fought for came up short.

-Eric Kohn, IndieWire: B

The trial, as Sorkin presents it, is really about the soul of America — the ability to protest, to question the most fundamental actions of the government. The overlap between the 1968 Chicago protests and the Black Lives Matter protests that have taken place this year is all too obvious. Yet the true parallel, I think, is that “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is really about what it looks like when a society starts to treat people speaking freely as if they were doing something dangerous. The movie reminds you, quite stirringly, that the Chicago 7 weren’t attacking America. They were upholding it.

-Owen Gleiberman, Variety

And leave it to Sorkin — whose only other film as director, “Molly’s Game,” felt prescient in its portrayal of predatory men in Hollywood and beyond — to catch the mood of 2020 with a film he began working on many years beforehand. At a time of so much focus on police brutality, and a time when protest is being demonized as the election approaches, this story set 50 years ago feels oddly, frighteningly vital.

-Steve Pond, The Wrap

While many will draw parallels between scenes involving civil unrest to the events of 2020, the philosophical differences between Hayden and Abbie — cultural versus electoral revolution, respectively — ring closely to the debates raging within progressive politics today, and actually prove more interesting. But how much viewers engage with the “Trial of the Chicago 7” will have more to do with its naturally captivating story, and the comedic dialogue, than anything Sorkin as a director provides. But through a punch-the-air final act, one that’s the definition of defiance, Sorkin’s melodrama reassures us of the power of sticking to one’s beliefs.

-Robert Daniels, The Playlist: B-

Aaron Sorkin is at his most portentous with this inert film, stuffed with stars, which mislocates the point of the trial it dramatises

-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 2/5

The script saves some of its most fiery material for them, the kind of thunderbolt Sorkin-isms that land with a satisfying crack. Though it allows them to inhabit quieter moments, too, and the movie is at its best when it roots itself in the real consequences of the case — not only for the men involved, but for a nation increasingly unable to bridge its most painful divides. In that, Chicago 7 frames the past not just as entertaining prologue but a living document; one we ignore at our own peril.

-Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: B

The question of how we approach protest is an important one because it needs to be ingrained into our daily lives. I think even Sorkin would agree that our institutions have become infected with bad actors who seek to turn those institutions against the people they were meant to protect. “Protests are good” is a fine sentiment, but the culture is already there, and while Chicago 7 acknowledges that these protests will have internal conflict and face external violence, there needs to be more recognition that something has truly rotted America. Sorkin’s faith in institutions has clearly chipped away, but The Trial of the Chicago 7 shows he’s uncertain about what should go in its place.

-Matt Goldberg, Collider: B-

Certain events are rearranged from the factual timelines, and yes, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” exercises poetic license. This is not a documentary; it’s a dramatization of events that resonates with great power while containing essential truths, and it’s one of the best movies of the year.

-Richard Roeper, The Chicago Sun Times: 4/4

For a time, Steven Spielberg was attached to direct The Trial Of The Chicago 7, and his absence is felt in the televisual staging: For all the sentimental uplift of this film’s closing minutes, Sorkin lacks the master’s skill — flaunted in Lincoln and The Post — at enlivening gabby civics lessons. The film could have used some of Spielberg’s craft and twinkly open-hearted conviction... or, perhaps conversely, more of Hoffman’s radical, down-with-The-Man sensibility. Ultimately, Sorkin seems less interested in the actual politics of any of his seven than in the way their flipped bird to the establishment facilitates his own taste for zingers, clever comebacks, and grandstanding. Parallels to the present aside, Trial Of The Chicago 7 is ultimately more timeless than timely in its flaws and conventions. Which is to say that some things sadly never go out of fashion, like perversions of justice and eleventh hour surprise witnesses in legal dramas.

-A.A. Dowd, The A.V. Club: C+

Language is Sorkin’s power, and it’s easy to see what drew him to this project: language is what gives the characters here their power as well. And while there are moments that sound like Sorkin is preaching to the choir, there’s a great emphasis on the words the characters use, and how those words either get them in trouble, or ultimately give them strength. From a movie-making perspective, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is sturdy but not particularly revelatory. But as a delivery system for great performers rattling off great dialogue, it’s almost unbeatable.

-Chris Evangelista, /FILM: 7.5/10

While character development is a bit of an issue with so many personalities rioting, arguing and bantering, it doesn’t impede the thought-provoking nature of “Chicago 7” or parallels that Sorkin draws between the ‘60s and now – and without a bunch of narrative gymnastics. The filmmaker crafts an entertaining, immersive and ultimately optimistic spectacle that never forgets, especially at its ending, that humanity should always trump the system.

-Brian Truitt, USA Today: 3.5/4

Unfortunately, the film has relatively little of that kind of punchiness. As a director, Sorkin hasn’t yet grasped how to meld personal drama and historical sweep into a cohesive whole. Although the strong cast helps the film through some of its weaker segments, Sorkin’s attempt to bring a Spielbergian fluidity to the flashbacks to convention riot chaos often fall flat. But while The Trial of the Chicago 7 ends on something of a movie-of-the-week note, given the timing of its release as a current Department of Justice gins up spurious charges against political enemies, it nevertheless carries a certain past-is-prologue immediacy.

-Chris Barsanti, Slant: 2.5/4

“The Trial of the Chicago 7” offers an absorbing account, in some ways alarming and in some ways reassuring, of an earlier moment of polarization and violent conflict. It isn’t just like now, but the analogies are enough to get you thinking about what happens in a democracy when state power confronts popular dissent. A loud, chaotic mess. A tragedy and a farce. And that’s if we’re lucky.

-A.O. Scott, The New York Times

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PLOT

Based on the story of the Chicago Seven, a group of seven defendants charged by the federal government with conspiracy in 1969 and 1970, inciting to riot, and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War and countercultural protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois, on the occasion of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

DIRECTOR/WRITER

Aaron Sorkin

MUSIC

Daniel Pemberton

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Phedon Papamichael

Release date:

September 25, 2020 (select theaters)

October 16, 2020 (Netflix)

STARRING

• Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale

• Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman

• Daniel Flaherty as John Froines

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richard Schultz

• Michael Keaton as Ramsey Clark

• Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman

• John Carroll Lynch as David Dellinger

• Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden

• Noah Robbins as Lee Weiner

• Mark Rylance as William Kunstler

• Alex Sharp as Rennie Davis

• Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin

• Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Fred Hampton

• William Hurt as John N. Mitchell

• Rory Cochrane as Homer

• J. C. MacKenzie as Tom Foran

• Ben Shenkman as Leonard Weinglass

• Max Adler as Stan Wojohowski

Submitted September 25, 2020 at 08:43AM by SanderSo47 https://ift.tt/3cuXtIY