Measuring a film by its inclusion or not in an awards ceremony is in bad taste. But like good hypocrites, we start to do it as soon as the awards season starts to run, and we reaffirm it when the Oscar and its nominations skyrocket. The exercise of seeing productions in this light is, in the end, a bit obscene: can we really abstract from “noise” and think about its attributes, its faults? Can we forget about the adjacent glitters or the race that ends on April 25? Obviously not, because in fact this note is the proof: so far, The Observer (and especially who writes) had not sunk the tooth to The Chicago 7 trial firmly. Yes, brief recommendations, mentions, spontaneous appearances had been published. He had become aware of her existence, of which is since December on Netflix, which is the new of Aaron Sorkin, But nothing more.
And now we do. It happens, of course, because of the Oscar. And the question arises again: can we think about it without, worth the redundancy, being thinking about the golden statuette that it now pursues as part of the group of nominees for best film? We can at least try.
The Chicago 7 trial is the latest production of Sorkin for the big screen. Or, rather, for streaming. It is his second film as a director after debut in Master bet (2017) and a successful screenwriting career that includes the film Matter of honor (1992), the series The West Wing of the White House (1999-2006, also known by its English name, The West Wing), the feature films Red Social (2010) by David Fincher and Moneyball (2011), the HBO series The Newsroom (2012-2014) and the biographical film Steve Jobs by Danny Boyle (2015), among others.
Sorkin was always a great screenwriter. Among his many qualities, he has shown an enormous capacity to, for example, turn long conversations that in other hands would be dull and boring, turn into dizzying exchanges made of words that stick like darts. Sorkin, in addition, handles like few others the art of the speech in the cinema. Either in the aforementioned 1992 legal drama with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson (remember the “you can’t handle the truth“,” You can’t handle the truth “?), In the scenarios of Steve Jobs or in the voice of the virulent Mark Zuckerberg of Red Social, he knows which buttons to press to turn a scene of someone speaking or shouting to gold. In gold of the one that Hollywood likes. And there is something of that, too, in The Chicago 7 trial.
Has six Oscar nominations
The story has deep and well-known roots in the United States, but it is more unknown in these parts of the southern hemisphere. In 1968 the social temperature of the country was through the roof and Vietnam did nothing but spit adolescent and American corpses every day. In between, the struggles for rights were at their peak, the Black Panthers were fighting to forcibly claim the place of their race and the controversial LBJ was preparing to leave the White House.
That year’s elections are important to this story: it is during the Democratic Convention in Chicago – which would choose as a candidate Hubert Humphrey, who in turn would later lose the generals to Richard Nixon – when a series of peaceful leftist groups decided to protest against the war. And although the idea was to accompany and demonstrate their disagreement in a kind of three-day carnival of peace, love, joint and music, the situation turned around: for reasons not yet fully clarified, the police collided with these groups, the stones and tear gas, and soon the entire city was engulfed in a series of huge riots that ended with the arrest of eight leaders. All but one were key members of these organizations. Bobby Seale, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, was also arrested and tried along with the rest. After embarrassing public humiliations, pressure from the defendants themselves and the impossibility of trying him along with the rest for not finding concrete evidence, Seale was released – he had barely been in Chicago for four hours; It was all, and it was clear, a move to “racialize” the trial against seven whites.
The remaining defendants were referred to in the press as the Chicago Seven, and the trial began. Although, to tell the truth, it was more of a circus than anything else, an episode contaminated by public opinion, politics, the ineffectiveness of an angry judge and a jury that received threats every other day. The reality is even more startling than what Sorkin’s film shows, but that’s what the history books are for. We, better, travel the ways of fiction.
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The film recounts the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention
Sunday afternoon
In The Chicago 7 trial Sorkin takes this great event that marked the last years of the 1960s and fills it with fiction. There are unlikely situations that happened as is, and there are others, like the end, with which he took some licenses. The objective is clear: to find in the historical fact one of those judicial dramas that Hollywood and the audience like so much. Spoiler? Did.
The trial falls into the category of a pochoclera movie, or a Sunday afternoon movie, and it does so with gusto. Despite its two hours and coins, Sorkin makes use of an easily digestible structure that alternates trials, protests, what happens in the private sphere of the accused and some repercussions outside the court that give it color, atmosphere and social temperature to the entire combo. The tensions are instantly apparent and the interests of each character as well. The struggles, in the film, are defined: political power against citizen power, repression against individual freedoms, the right opposed to duty.
The scheme, then, is adapted so that everyone can follow the stride of the story and does not have too many chiaroscuro. There are presentations for all the characters involved, there are times when those same characters explain what is happening in case someone is left behind and, obviously, there are well differentiated sides.
In that sense, gray seems to be quite elusive to Sorkin when it comes to delineating a group of characters that are a bit flat, even some that in the eyes of the voters of the Academy deserve to be nominated for their work (Sacha Baron Cohen) . Perhaps the only ones who seem to have certain doubts or nuances are Eddie Redmayne’s Tom Hayden and the prosecutor played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, added to the interesting lawyer represented by the decisive Mark Rylance.
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Sacha Baron Cohen is nominated for best supporting actor for this film
But in this quasi-Manichean exercise where we always know which side to be on, Sorkin succeeds in not taking the whole circus too seriously and thus achieving an agile film, which knows how to park and accelerate in its good action sequences, which has time to open a parenthesis on what happened to another leader of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton – a situation that dialogues with another film nominated for an Oscar this year: Judas and the black messiah– and that delivers a couple of truly exciting moments. Did they happen? Are they made up? That does not matter: although this is seen by Netflix, it is pure Hollywood. And you can see it.
And this is the moment when the note fails, becomes contaminated and the question appears: Really a movie like The Chicago 7 trial does he deserve the six nominations he has? Sorkin does a great job with a script that adjusts for the widest and most heterogeneous palate possible, but it’s still a bit too much.
Is it unfair even for the film to see it under that particular magnifying glass? Perhaps the pretensions should be lowered and consider that 2021 of American cinema, in terms of awards, will be half a hair down. Even more, if compared to the handful of nominees in the last edition –The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood, Parasites, Marriage Story, Joker, 1917, among other-. Luckily there are exceptions.
If you can abstract from the Oscar-winning paraphernalia that now surrounds Aaron Sorkin’s latest movie on Netflix, you might have a pretty good time. In fact, you may even end up with a smile on your face. How many movies in this stormy March / April can afford that luxury?
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