One of the fears going into 2020 was that the Democratic National Convention would become a replay of 1968—only this time with right wing agitation stoking the violence instead of left-wing protests. As it happened, this year’s DNC went virtual but 50-plus years later the argument over 1968 continues. Did the mayhem that erupted in Chicago around the DNC frighten middle-class voters, ushering Nixon into the White House on a law-and-order platform?
And in the words of William Kunstler to Tom Hayden in The Trial of the Chicago 7, “Who started the riot, Tom?” Writer-director Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, Steve Jobs) poses the situation from many angles, apportioning responsibility across many hands and weighing the different varieties of idealism. Sorkin doesn’t tell us what to think as much as give us things to think about.
The cast is tops, playing recognizably believable versions of people who were notorious in their day. The prominent defendants in the federal case brought against several DNC protest leaders by the Nixon administration in 1969 were a mixed bag with Abbie Hoffman (hilariously channeled by Sacha Baron Cohen), Jerry Reuben (Jeremy Strong), Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) and Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Dellinger is the odd man out, a middle-class dad and scoutmaster who happens to be a pacifist. The others are young, and Sorkin neatly positions them across the political spectrum: Davis is an idealist whose only commitment is to end the killing in Vietnam. Hayden wants to change the system by working within the system. Hoffman, a prankster who thinks the system is absurd, calls for a cultural as well as a political revolution. His friend Reuben is even more fervid, teaching bomb-making classes in preparation for storming the citadel.
Seale, a Black Panther leader, stands in a class by himself. “Dr. King had a dream. Now he has a bullet in his head,” he says. He expects no mercy from the system. He’s not playing games.
Except for Seale, the defendants are represented by star attorney William Kunstler, played with world-weary, street (and court)-wise pragmatism by Milwaukee-reared Mark Rylance. In Sorkin’s screenplay, Kunstler is the anchor that keeps his unruly clients more or less in line. Sitting across from them on the dais is Federal Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), speaking in orotund patrician vowels and boding no dissent.
Abbie Hoffman and Reuben are determined to monkey-wrench the proceedings. They wear judicial robes to court and when ordered to remove them, strip to reveal police uniforms. Contempt of court citations stream from the bench. Seale’s attempts to plead his case are struck down with force. Eventually he is carried into the courtroom bound and gagged and chained to a chair. Sorkin suggests that Judge Hoffman was senescent, unaware that he—as much as Abbie Hoffman and Reuben—is turning the trial into a spectacle.
Sorkin repeatedly flashes back from the courtroom to events on the ground near the DNC. Told to give no quarter, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s police are ready to break heads. Most of the protesters think they are making a statement on the war for convention delegates and the hovering network news cameras, but a combination of irresponsible parties, unanticipated circumstances and the heat of events sparked the clashes that remain synonymous with Chicago 1968.
With a masterful understanding of human behavior, Sorkin manages to endow all the leading figures with sympathy except perhaps for one—Nixon’s blunt-speaking Attorney General John Mitchell, who orders the prosecution for reasons that have less to do with law enforcement than with politics and his own petulance.
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