Sorkin’s ‘Chicago 7’ film revisits an infamous U.S trial

Above: A scene from the Netflix film "The Trial of the Chicago 7." (Netflix)

Movie review: "The Trial of the Chicago 7," written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Rylance, Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Frank Langella. Streaming on Netflix.

So many 20th-century legal proceedings made headlines that it’s difficult to label any one of them as “The Trial of the Century.” We had the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of the 1920s, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial of the 1930s, the Rosenberg espionage trial of the 1950s and the O.J. Simpson murder trial of the 1990s.

And that’s just to name a few.

One of the proceedings that belongs among the Top 10, though, is the five-and-a-half-month, 1969 trial of the eight, subsequently reduced to seven, anti-war activists who were among the chief organizers of the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It is that controversial trial that writer-director Aaron Sorkin explores in his Netflix offering “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

If you know your American history, you recall that 1968 was an especially turbulent year. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and the Tet Offensive showed that the Vietnam War was far from over (in fact, nearly 17,000 American servicemen died in that year alone). Moreover, student protests of the war grew into a national movement – and that August thousands of protesters descended on Chicago, where the Democratic convention was being held.

Attempting to disrupt the event, and at the same time focus attention on the war, protest organizers – among them the seven men who would eventually be tried – led crowds that were met by baton-wielding members of the Chicago police. And the result, which was seen on television screens all over the world, was brutally violent and bloody.

In the aftermath, eight men were initially tried on a range of charges, the most serious being conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting riots. The accused were: Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Lee Weiner, John Froines and Bobby Seale (with Seale, ultimately, being dropped from the trial and sentenced to prison by the presiding judge, Julius Hoffman, on several contempt of court charges).

Ultimately, five of the defendants (though not Weiner and Froines) were convicted – mostly, like Seale, on contempt charges – though the convictions were ultimately overturned on appeal. As were the contempt convictions levied against the group’s attorneys William Kunstler (played by Mark Rylance) and Leonard Weinglass (played by Ben Shenkman).

In attempting to capture all this, Sorkin follows the path of most filmmakers who re-create historical events by taking, for dramatic purposes, liberties with the truth. A scene involving Hayden (the former Student for a Democratic Society president played by Eddie Redmayne) reading the names of U.S. military dead is melodramatic to a fault. And though it did occur, it didn’t happen during sentencing, and it was not Hayden but Dellinger (played by John Carrol Lynch) who read the names, an act that was shut down almost immediately by Judge Hoffman. And speaking of Dellinger, the committed pacifist never punched a court bailiff.

In other cases, though, Sorkin – if anything – underplays what really happened. The Black Panther leader Seale (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), was without his attorney, who was absent due to medical issues. Denied the right to represent himself, Seale protested. And when he continued to complain, Judge Hoffman (played by Frank Langella) eventually had him bound and gagged for three long days – not the few minutes that the movie portrays.

As for the catcalling by the Yippies Hoffman and Rubin (played respectively by Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong), their disrespect for Judge Hoffman was far more audacious than what the movie shows. Same with the others, including attorneys Kunstler and Weinglass. And, yes, the two Yippies did show up one day wearing judicial robes. So though Sorkin shows Judge Hoffman handing out contempt citations as if they were Tic Tacs, the real number is almost beyond belief: 175 in all.

Sorkin, as is his style, engages in a number of “West Wing”-type dialogues, in particular between Baron Cohen’s Hoffman and Redmayne’s Hayden. And while his leftist sympathies are on full display, he doesn’t let Hayden in particular off the hook: Though he was angry that his friend Davis had been beaten by the police, Hayden made a call for action that, at least in Sorkin’s version, ends up being the precipitating event for much of the ensuing violence.

But then we shouldn’t depend on filmmakers to determine the facts of history. Those facts regarding the trial of the Chicago 7 are available for anyone willing to do the slightest bit of research. Particularly in the polarized era in which we now live, it’s a good thing to review the past on a regular basis – and with a clear eye.

It’s the one sure way we can at least try to avoid repeating the same mistakes.