The Trial Of The Chicago 7 is a period courtroom drama based on the real trial following the 1968 Chicago riots. The film follows the trial and flashes back to the events that lead up to the '68 democratic convention and the subsequent riots.
The ensemble cast is brimming with talent but the story moves so quickly, is conveniently truncated to heighten the titular trial, that no character has enough screentime to be an actual person. Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman gets the closest and Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin is actually playful but the rest aren't given much time or much in the way of actual characterization. Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden particularly suffers from this thinness of detectable personality and comes across as an two dimensional bore. There are far too many characters and too much ground to cover to do the story justice in a feature run time as such some incredible talent is wasted- Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Fred Hampton alone would be worth a feature.
The period production is effective and you can't argue with the hook and momentum or writer/director Sorkin's dialogue but the film has a Hollywood slickness to it, an inappropriate breeziness, that given our current socio-political upheaval seems somewhat baffling. The courtroom sequences particularly are broad to the point of ludicrousness, and it's possible they reflect the reality but if so more attention should have been paid to there construction. Given the recent popularity of true crime I don't think any viewer watching The Trial Of The Chicago 7 would not know immediately that it would be overturned on appeal, and as such the trial itself has little to no tension, and what we are left with is thin characters in a court room drama more in line with the taste of Sorkin's 90's heyday(Rainmaker, Time To Kill) than our present.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
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