The Trial of the Chicago 7 hits enough drama pleasure centers to be suspicious. In an extended, opening montage that plays like a television series title sequence, writer-director Aaron Sorkin introduces us to each of the eventual defendants in the trial of the title, as they make plans to protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Then, outside of a few flashbacks to the actual events of the case, we’re mostly plopped into the courtroom itself, where the likes of Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and others defend themselves against charges of conspiracy in the wake of the violence that erupted at the protests. The cast is uniformly entertaining—including Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as prosecuting attorney Richard Schultz—but that’s part of the problem. (Baron Cohen is such a one-liner machine playing the court clown that he received one of the film’s six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.) Whenever The Trial of the Chicago 7 made me smile with a pithy dialogue exchange or perfectly executed dramatic exclamation point, I couldn’t help but wonder if history was being done a bit of a disservice. This is too neat, tidy, and digestible of a take on such a wrenching topic—especially when we know the forces of injustice at work here were only temporarily stymied by this trial, and hardly defeated.
