Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of some rightful cinematic classics like A Few Good Men (1992) and The Social Network (2010), as well as, more relevantly here, television shows like The West Wing (1999-2006) and The Newsroom (2012-14), has taken to the director’s chair to realize his script for the historical drama The Trial of the Chicago 7, now out on Netflix. The notorious knock on Sorkin, which he earned mostly via The West Wing, is his penchant for long-winded speechmaking and didacticism, especially as a means of promoting mainstream, diplomatic liberalism.
This new film is a transparent attempt to rewrite that reputation. Sorkin has researched a historical event highly relevant to today’s political climate, and, as usual, has written a central character—Tom Hayden, played by Eddie Redmayne—who espouses the virtues of pragmatism and restraint in order to most effectively achieve liberal victories. But this time, Sorkin wants to be hip. So he’s written Abbie Hoffman (Sasha Baron Cohen) as a witty frenemy for Hayden in order to represent the more progressive wing of liberal politics, and the two characters go at it with spirited debate about how to best conduct the fight for social justice.
Sorkin thinks he’s written an evenhanded philosophical dispute, but he’s Sorkin, so he hasn’t. In the movie’s thematic climax, when Hoffman questions Hayden’s liberal convictions, Hayden delivers this devastating, unanswerable excoriation:
Hayden: “My problem is that for the next fifty years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re gonna think of you. … They’re not gonna think of equality or justice; they’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress. They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers, and so we’ll lose elections.”
How coincidental that Hayden’s fifty-year imagination extends forward to…right now! It’s almost as if this eerily prophetic speech was written, in fact, by a screenwriter fifty years in the future who stacked the deck for this particular character by endowing him with infallible foresight.
Hoffman protests, but he can’t erase the absolute demolition Hayden has just wreaked upon hippies and Bernie Bros everywhere. Not to fear, though, because Hoffman eventually does manage to suitably impress Hayden by revealing that he has read all of Hayden’s own writings. Hmm.
Sorkin also forays into racial tensions in America. He holds up well enough here, and there are some profound moments. They’re predicated, though, on the requirement, which, to be fair, is true to the historical record, that Bobby Searle (Yahya Abdul-Mateen) isn’t going to stick around for the whole movie. As in any old school horror, which I suppose this is in a way, the black guy goes first.
That leaves room for Hayden to steal the finale—patriotic music playing, evil judge raging—by proving once and for all that he’s one of the gang, one of the cool kids. That he’s on the right side of history.
It’s a bit of artistic anxiety: Sorkin in 2020 is worried that, with a body of work that features The West Wing, he might not be. And he could be right or wrong: I, unlike Sorkin’s characters, don’t have a screenwriter to feed me unfair prescience. Maybe pragmatic liberalism will stand the test of time. In fact, I hope it does.
But it doesn’t really matter here, because the stench of pandering transcends politics, current events, and even movie craftsmanship. Sorkin, in trying to please somebody—the Twitter universe, perhaps—has made an inauthentic film, a lowlight in his successful career. His impulse toward those pushy political radicals has always been exasperation, and that impulse is perfectly artistically valid. But it’s precisely because it is valid that it is impossible to hide, and if Sorkin keeps trying to bury it, the quality of his work will continue to suffer going forward.
– Jim Andersen
For more negative reviews, see my piece on Promising Young Woman.