1. Is Sacha Baron Cohen quietly one of the most underrated actors of our generation? He’s going into awards season playing an intellectual Vietnam protestor….and Borat. And he should absolutely be recognized for both.
2. Also, I understand Jeremy Strong as an actor a bit more I think. I love Succession (Team Shiv!) and I do think Kendall Roy is an interesting one to watch, but never having seen him in anything else, I’ve never been totally sure about his performance. I’m sure now. He’s playing that character exactly right, and he played the counterpart to Cohen’s character in Chicago 7 exactly right as well. Good job, sir.
3. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale is the real force though. He is so committed and I fully believe him as a Black Panther in the 60s. I’ve seen Kelvin Harrison Jr. in a few things (Luce is exceptional) and I have no qualms toward him, but his portrayal of Fred Hampton didn’t really pop to me the way I would’ve expected it to, but maybe that was a deliberate choice by Aaron Sorkin so as not to compete with Bobby Seale.
4. There really is so much good acting. I’ve never hated a judge more than I hated Frank Langella. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is completely believable as a twerpy little agent of the government. Michael Keaton makes the most of this limited time. Eddie Redmayne is very good at playing characters I have to root for, because of the story, but don’t really like. Great casting all around.
5. This is an Aaron Sorkin production. You either like Aaron Sorkin or you don’t. If you hate Aaron Sorkin, then you probably won’t love this movie, but I usually enjoy the way he puts dialogue together and I like the pace of his stuff, so it all worked for me.
6. I watched this movie with someone else and I got the sense that if you don’t know anything about the Vietnam protests or the 1968 election cycle or you’ve never heard about the riots in Chicago (or across the country really), you might be a little bit lost in the beginning when the players are being introduced. Sorkin does a good job of identifying everyone with title cards, but it’s a lot of names a lot of information if you’re completely unfamiliar with the political climate at that time. You can go into it blind (he knew what was going on by the end) but if you’re annoyed by being in a fog during a movie, brush up a little first.
7. I’ve only said good things! Which is rare! And that’s about to end now. If I stopped this review right here it’d get a solid 8 from me but I’m about to bust this foolishness all the way down to a 4 because the ending pissed me off to no end.
SPOILER ALERT!
At the end of the movie, Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) is being addressed by the judge because Hayden is the least offensive of the defendants. He’s a clean-cut, stand-up kid who seems to respect the court, so the judge tells him to keep his remarks brief, respectful, and remorseful, and he’ll keep that in mind for sentencing. Hayden decides to read the list of Americans who have died in Vietnam since their trial began — almost 5,000 names. The music swells, the courtroom stands, and the movie ends.
THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN!
“Why are you so mad? Directors change bits of the story all the time!”
I’m mad because this particular bit of the story is the most obnoxious change I’ve seen to a true story in some time. First of all, David Dellinger (not Tom Hayden) attempted to read the names earlier in the trial and was quickly silenced by the court. What actually happened during sentencing is, the defendants (not just Hayden, but others as well) addressed racism in the criminal justice system. When I watched the movie I was like “wait…that doesn’t feel right to me” because I had briefly studied the Chicago 7 in high school and I thought I remembered some very pro-Black statements. I did. I just looked them up.
This is what Jerry Rubin said: What you are doing out there is creating millions of revolutionaries. Julius Hoffman, you have done more to destroy the court system in this country than any of us could have done. All we did was go to Chicago and the police system exposed itself as totalitarian. And I am glad we exposed the court system because in millions of courthouses across this country blacks are being shuttled from the streets to the jails and nobody knows about it. They are forgotten men. There ain’t a whole corps of press people sitting and watching. They don’t care. You see what we have done is, we have exposed that. Maybe now people will be interested in what happens in the courthouse down the street because of what happened here. Maybe now people will be interested.
David Dellinger said: Whatever happens to us, however unjustified, will be slight compared to what has happened already to the Vietnamese people, to the black people in this country, to the criminals with whom we are now spending our days in the Cook County jail.
Tom Hayden (who Sorkin has reading off Vietnam casualties): I have sat there in the Cook County Jail with people who can’t make bond, with people who have bum raps, with people who are nowhere, people who are the nothings of society, people who say to me, “You guys burned your draft cards. I would like to burn my birth certificate so they can never find me again.”
Why did Aaron Sorkin decide to scrap this?
Last year, the US saw protests against the establishment on a scale we had not seen since the 1960s when this movie took place. The conversation about Black people and the criminal justice system is at the front of everyone’s minds. Sorkin just made a movie set during the Civil Rights movement. He shows a Black Panther being beaten by law enforcement in the film. Fred Hampton is assassinated during the film and Sorkin shows its effect on Bobby Seale. But the end of the movie, when the white protagonists show solidarity with Black people, Sorkin decides to take that out???
I don’t get it and it pisses me off that it’s not in the movie. It’s a baffling decision that I don’t understand, so if anybody who has seen the movie has any insight into what happened, feel free to let me know and I can come back an add some additional information.
Score: 4/10
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