The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

 Score: 5 / 5

"The whole world is watching!"

Aaron Sorkin's latest movie is an astounding project, on par with so many of his pieces in terms of wit, beauty, and urgency. It is also, now, very possibly my favorite of his films (closely contending with Steve Jobs) simply as a result of its massive scope and thrilling timeliness. Manifesting the best of his work, The Trial of the Chicago 7 teaches as it dramatizes, assembling an amazing cast and letting each major player have glorious moments in the spotlight, and cuts through difficult ideological and historical complexities even as it entertains. Molly's Game was a solid directorial debut, but here is Sorkin at his finest, both as writer and burgeoning director, and it deserved so much more than a Netflix premiere.

The film's prologue features stock news footage from the '60s, quickly and efficiently painting the scene: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King, President Johnson increasing the draft for an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, and the looming Democratic National Convention in Chicago to find a successor to JFK, as Johnson would not campaign again. These scenes are interspersed with the main characters of our story, eight young men leading or representing various liberal factions, as they prepare to head to the Windy City to participate in the convention. We suddenly skip to five months later, when all eight have been arrested for conspiracy to incite rioting. Which, of course, happened in August 1968.

Apart from these eight central characters, we're quickly introduced to their legal counsel, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as lead prosecutor and Mark Rylance as attorney for seven of the eight defendants. The film, as you might have guessed, closely follows the trial and highlights the absurd length of time taken to determine justice; justice, unfortunately, is not the goal here, and it is often repeated that the publicly scrutinized trial is a political farce. Sorkin seems hell-bent to paint it in all its complex enormity but without too much razzle-dazzle we might expect from a Chicago courtroom musical. At key points, he allows flashbacks so that we can see the various outbreaks of violence that comprised the convention protests and riots; it is in these scenes that we see perhaps most clearly the urgency of Sorkin's screenplay, as the corrupt police force engages in brutal and illegal behaviors against the protestors.

Indeed, the timeliness of this film was surely why it was released when it was, on Netflix in mid-October, just as bills against protests gain support in various legislatures and the country was on the brink of its most important election in many years. The incredible Frank Langella graces the screen as the villainous judge Julius Hoffman, the kind of juicy role he always deserves and rarely gets, a Trumpian character at once terrifying and eminently watchable; he is only clearly evil in the moments when his incompetence fractures. And, given the turmoil of the DNC in 2016, our political climate is definitely ready to revisit this most infamous of debacles in popular sovereignty.

All the actors are giving masterclasses here, all the more so because they are actively supporting each other in this massive movie. Sorkin displays his incomparable ability to make even frantic, emotionally charged, intellectually intricate dialogue sound beautiful, but he also caters dialogue to the characters he's created. Even if it's at times weird that the "Yippies" (played by a delightful Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen, who I liked for the first time in a movie) speak in such a polished manner, the actors uniformly make Sorkin's instantly recognizable style palatable and believable. Mark Rylance deserves perhaps the most credit, as he allows brief pauses each time before he speaks, allowing us to believe his lines are actually not scripted.

The beats pile up quickly, and it's hard sometimes to gauge where the facts morph into fiction. But, while he is attempting to teach us parts of history, Sorkin is more interested in the ideas and feelings involved for us in 2020. So even if he doesn't get all the facts exactly right, the sensation of the story he's telling is no less harrowing for its dramatization. More importantly, it's not really trying to teach us any clear moral lesson, a tendency Sorkin often flirts with; rather, he's showing us the dangerous theatricality in the courtroom and the internal war the U.S. government waged on its own citizens, and one key way that war was handled by some of the most outspoken, irreverent, and idealistic young people of the times. It's a story for us, for now, and in that, it is one of the best movies this year.