The Trial of the Chicago 7

 (Movie Review)

Why I Saw This Movie / My History with this Subject

So, this trial has been an historical interest of mine since I was in high school.
I first learned about this trial when doing a high school report on the Black Panthers.  In college, I became more interested in the history of radical politics and the student protest movement, and I read a lot about this trial during that time.  (I also wrote about the trial in a book report I did for a college class on African American history).

I've also seen this trial dramatized several times before:
* The 1987 made-for-TV HBO movie Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8.  (My Thoughts on Re-Watching HERE).
* The 2000 Abbie Hoffman biopic Steal this Movie.  (Which I've never reviewed on this blog, because I saw it back in 2000 before I started blogging and haven't seen it since.  Although in a 2005 post I referenced it as an example of how Hollywood movies on the 1960s turn into cliches.)
* The 2007 movie Chicago 10 (my review HERE).  

I've also seen numerous -  documentaries on the protests and the trial over the years (off of both TV and Youtube).

I think it's fair to say my obsession with radical politics has somewhat faded with age (a fairly common trajectory, I think), but because of my youthful obsession, I still maintain at least somewhat of an interest in this trial still now.

I've also been anticipating this movie for years.
Reports that Steven Spielberg and Aaron Sorkin were working on a movie about the Chicago trial have been around for years (this movie had famously been stuck in development hell since 2006) and over the years, whenever I was browsing the web or reading about this trial on Wikipedia, I would see reports that an all-star Hollywood version of this story was in development.  "Wouldn't that be cool to see?" I often thought to myself.  The names attached to this movie have changed several times over the years, and at a couple points, it looked like this movie would never come out. And to be quite honest, I forgot about the whole thing.  But then a couple weeks ago, I started seeing reviews of this movie popping up on Youtube.  It was on Netflix now, people were saying.

"This movie looks really cool," I said to my wife.  "It's a pity I'm not going to be able to see it anytime soon.  It's only on Netflix."
"My friend has a Netflix account he's not using," my wife replied.
Well, problem solved!
Plus, the wife and baby were travelling this weekend, so I had the apartment to myself and for once had the peace and quiet to actually sit down and watch a movie.  So here's the review.

The Review
Man, I could go on for hours about all the stuff Aaron Sorkin gets right, and all the stuff he gets wrong.  I mean it, there is so much to talk about here.

But I'm going to try to restrain myself from that.  Back in 2013, I decided that I was no longer going to waste time writing long movie reviews.  I've bent my own rules a few times since then, but I've never violated the general principle--I'm not going to spend hours or days writing up a movie review anymore.  I just don't have the time at this stage in my life.

Instead, I'm going to try to talk about this movie in very general terms, and not nit-pick every little historical detail.  (Even though I totally could!)
[Short version: Basically none of the historical figures in this movie are portrayed accurately.  Sorkin has distorted the original history in order to make an identifiable character-type out of each historical figure, that he can then use to create cheap drama.  In reality, Rennie Davis was never so nerdy as Sorkin portrays him, Jerry Rubin was never so chill, Tom Hayden was never so uptight, David Dellinger was never so boring, Abbie Hoffman's quips were never so sharp, Richard Schultz was never so nice, et cetera.]

In general terms then...
The thing about the Chicago 7 trial is we actually have the transcripts of the court proceedings.  In most historical movies, the screenwriters have to imagine what the historical characters might have said, but in this case, you don't have to imagine anything.  We have the actual transcripts of what they actually said.
Therefore, most dramatizations of this trial just use the transcript.   The movies Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 and Chicago 10 that I mentioned above were dramatizations made using the trial transcripts.

Aaron Sorkin has chosen to completely re-write the trial.  In some cases, he has kept the essence of the dialogue the same, but has re-written it so that it flows differently.  In other cases, he's completely changed the actual history.
At first, this struck me as sacrilege.  But then, I thought about it, and I thought, "Well... why not?"  After all, we already have movies about the Chicago 7 that are based on the transcripts.  If you want to see a movie based on the transcript, you can just go and watch: Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8.  But there's no point in hiring Aaron Sorkin, the  most talented screenwriter alive, and having him just re-use the transcript.  Let Sorkin do his thing.  Let him completely re-write it so that every character is now talking in the famous quippy Sorkin dialogue.  Why not?  It's not historical, but it's entertaining.

Now, the thing about Sorkin is that sometimes he can be brilliant, and sometimes he can be really cheesy and corny.  Charlie Wilson's War and The Social Network are examples of Sorkin at his most brilliant.  The Newsroom and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip are examples of Sorkin being corny.
But, even when Sorkin gets corny, he never gets boring.  As I wrote in my review of The Newsroom: 

Aaron Sorkin may mess up a lot of things, but he still understands the mechanics of screenwriting very well.  Each episode may be terrible objectively if you focus on the plot, but Aaron Sorkin still knows how to keep the dialogue snappy and he knows how to keep the forward momentum of the story going.  So the show may be terrible, but it never really gets boring.  And, I have to confess that even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it.

Much of that was true of The Trial of the Chicago 7.  Sorkin manufactures a lot of cheesy plot points that were not historical--Jerry Rubin gets his heart broken by an undercover cop who pretends to be in love with him, Rennie Davis has a girlfriend who doesn't know he's a protest leader, Richard Schultz actually is secretly conflicted about his job, et cetera.  None of this is historical, and all of this is really cheesy and corny but... but it kind of works as entertainment.  The snappy Sorkin dialogue keeps the plot moving, and once again: "...even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it."
And the Sorkin dialogue works.  The one-liners work.  (This movie got a chuckle out of me on more than one occasion).  The dramatic moments are slightly corny, but they work.

All that being said, it's interesting to compare this film to a film based off of the actual transcripts.  Compared on a scene for scene basis, the actual history is way more dramatic than Sorkin's re-writing of it.  There are several examples, but the most obvious example is the Bobby Seale incident.  The actual transcripts of Bobby Seale and Judge Julius Hoffman arguing over whether or not America's Founding Fathers were slaveholders is way more interesting than the dialogue Sorkin creates.  And the story of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in court is way more dramatic in the actual real history.  In Sorkin's version, Bobby Seale is only bound and gagged momentarily.  In the actual history, Bobby Seale was struggling against his gag and restraints for 3 days in the court.  

And yet... although on a scene by scene basis, the actual history is more compelling than fiction, when looking at the movie as a whole, Sorkin's version is far more entertaining and watchable than the more historically accurate versions of this story.  This is because Sorkin understands the importance of pacing, momentum, character arcs, and dramatic climaxes.  He has to sacrifice historical accuracy to get these things, but it works as drama.
The scenes of Bobby Seale struggling against his gag--getting re-gagged and rebound by the bailiffs, and the many scuffles that broke out on the trial floor--would have made for very interesting drama.  But it would also have slowed the movie down.  In Sorkin's version, Seale is only bound and gagged for a minute, and then this instantly moves the story on to the next phase.  And the whole movie is like this.  The drama of the individual scene is under-played to keep the story moving.  (There are so many examples where the actual trial was more chaotic and dramatic than what Sorkin showed on screen.  But to show all that would have slowed the movie down.)

Final verdict: Enjoy it for the drama, don't rely on it for historical accuracy.
For historical accuracy, check out Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8

Rating:
8 out of 10 Stars.  That's me being slightly generous to this movie.  It should probably lose another point for being overly cheesy in places, and possibly another star for all the history it gets wrong, and yet... and yet it's all good entertainment.  8 out of 10 it is.

Update: October 19, 2020

Okay, I can't resist.  Let's get into some of the historical nitpicking a little bit:

* The real life story of Rennie Davis getting beaten unconscious by the Chicago police was actually way more dramatic in reality than it was in Aaron Sorkin's version.  I'm genuinely puzzled as to why Sorkin re-wrote history to make that confrontation a lot more watered down than it actually was in real life.  Why would he do that?

* Fred Hampton was not actually a part of the Chicago 8 trail in real life.  So I'm a bit conflicted about how Sorkin shoe-horned his story into this movie.
On the one hand, the assassination of Fred Hampton is the pre-eminent example of "Stuff that every American should know, but that no one ever teaches you in school"  So on the one hand, I'm glad more people are learning about his story because of this movie.
But on the other hand, this movie is over-stuffed already, and it doesn't really have time to tell Fred Hampton's story.  (The movie doesn't have time to really emotionally process Fred Hampton's death, and it never even attempts to explain why he was assassinated.)  Plus, dramatically, it interferes with Bobby Seale's story.  In reality, Bobby Seale didn't have his outbursts because of Fred Hampton's death, he had his outbursts because he was so frustrated with Judge Hoffman.  And by making the outburst be about an outside element, it undermines the drama of the conflict between Seale and Hoffman.
Plus... for some reason, in Aaron Sorkin's movie, Bobby Seale makes a really big deal of saying that Fred Hampton was shot first in the shoulder before he was killed.  But this was not by far the most outrageous thing about Fred Hampton's death.  The most outrageous thing was that he was shot and killed in bed while he was sleeping.  So why does Aaron Sorkin's script make a big deal out of the fact that he was shot in the shoulder, and not even mention that was killed sleeping in bed?

* John Froines, and Lee Weiner were obviously the odd-men-out in the Chicago 7, in that they were the only members of the 7 who were not actually leaders of the anti-war movement.  It seems to be a bit of a mystery how they even ended up being indicted with the rest of them.
Aaron Sorkin shines a spot-light on this oddity by putting it right in the dialogue of his script. In Sorkin's script, John Froines and Lee Weiner will occasionally ask each other how they ended up being in the same group as the others.  (And I think Sorkin is right to highlight this--especially for younger viewers who are new to the history, it's a nice little way of conveying the information that these two weren't celebrities in their own right, but everyone else in the trial was.)
In Sorkin's script, Abbie Hoffman later says that John Froines and Lee Weiner were only put on trial so that they could be "give backs" to the jury--that is, the jury is meant to acquit John Froines and Lee Weiner, so that they will feel less guilt about convicting the rest. 
This makes about as much sense as anything (I mean, why else would these two be part of the trial?) but the problem is that it doesn't seem to be borne out by the actual trial transcripts.  The government prosecutors were not playing softball with John Froines and Lee Weiner--the government prosecutors (in real life) tried really hard to prove that John Froines and Lee Weiner were inciting violence at the protest.

* In Sorkin's version, life-long pacifist David Dellinger finally snaps and punches a deputy during a confrontation at the trial.  Oh, the dramatic irony!  And right in front of his wife and son too!  It's a really cheesy unhistorical Sorkin moment, but it kind of works as cheesy drama, I guess.
But if you look at the actual trial transcripts, in real life David Dellinger was accused of getting a bit physical with the court deputies during some of the confrontations with Bobby Seale.  So if you want to have a dramatic irony moment with David Dellinger losing his cool, why not incorporate it into the Bobby Seale parts?  It would be truer to the real history, and I think it might also work better in terms of drama.

* It's probably unfair to criticize this movie for everything it left out, right?  Because any dramatization of the Chicago 7 trial has to leave out a lot.  You can't possibly include everything.  So all the counter-culture celebrities and singers who testified, the confrontation with Mayor Daley on the witness stand,  Alan Ginsberg chanting "Om" in the witness stand, the Vietnam War Moratorium day, and the scuffle over the American flag and the Viet Cong Flag on the defense table....  all of that would have made great drama, but I guess all of that has to be left out.  The movie's too long already.
In real life, the increasingly vicious verbal sparing between William Kunstler and Tom Foran was much more dramatic than any of Sorkin's dialogue, but I guess you have to cut that out too.

In a book report I did for college--A Panther is a Black Cat by Reginald Major--I uncovered the story of the conflict between the Black Panthers and Tom Hayden. To quote from that report:

Major describes a cocktail party as an example of how relationships between white radicals and Panthers deteriorated. Black Panther David Hillard was there, who had already “pointedly questioned [Stew] Albert’s and Hayden’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist principles” (112), and, Major implies, found them to be lacking. When Hayden was asked to speak, Hillard jumped up and asked: “Yeah, goddamnit, get up and explain why you’re out on the streets and Bobby is in jail” (114). Hayden sidestepped the question by attacking the racist nature of America’s courts. Major condemns him.

“The question actually was why Hayden was not in jail. Bobby had been indicted, tried, placed in chains, and was subsequently sentenced to four years in jail for contempt of court as the result of a casual speechmaking excursion into the scene of hippie-involved political mayhem. Hillard’s words implied that if Hayden and his fellow defendants were really the revolutionaries they claimed to be, they would have closed ranks and stood on their conspiratorial constitutional rights when Bobby Seale was denied the right to represent himself, and if necessary to force the court to chain them all. It didn’t happen” (114).

Hillard was unimpressed by Hayden’s answer, and began to question him angrily. Stew Albert, a revolutionary writer who Major also dislikes, tried to smooth things over, but Hillard answered, “Fuck you, Albert, you jive-ass revolutionary. We can do without you and your shitty writing” (115). The conference finally ended with Hillard and the rest of the Panthers storming out.

Major asserts that:

“Hillard--in fact the Panthers generally—were very unhappy about this indictment, as it was a direct result of the Panthers association with white radicals. The indictment was a confirmation for a number of black people of their belief that a black-white radical alliance could only bring trouble to the Panthers” (109).

This is the type of dramatic confrontation that Sorkin could have milked for a lot of mileage, no?  And it would have added yet another dimension to Sorkin's portrayal of a fractured and squabbling defense.  Part of me really wishes Sorkin could have included this scene in his movie.  But the other part of me knows that the movie was too long already.

Video Review
Part 1 HERE and part 2 HERE: 

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky, Fundamental Issues in Linguistics (April 2019 at MIT) - Lecture 1

The Trial of the Chicago 7: Movie Review (Complete)