Aaron Sorkin is at his most portentous with this inert film, stuffed with stars, which mislocates the point of the trial it dramatises
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, creator of TV’s The West Wing and the birth-of-Facebook movie The Social Network, can give you sizzling dialogue and get you almost delirious with excitement about contemporary ideas. But he can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.
In 1968, the incoming Nixon administration greenlit the punitive prosecution of seven supposed ringleaders of a violent anti-war protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In fact, they were originally the “Chicago Eight”, but charges were finally dismissed against the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, who was notoriously bound and gagged in the courtroom to keep him silent. Somehow, this film manages to keep Seale in a peripheral role, concentrating far more on how upset the verbose white liberals are at his treatment.
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