24 minutes into “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and already embarrassed for Sorkin, the cast, the judiciary, radical protest movements, and American history itself

The fact that this movie could win an Oscar is the “Nice White Parents” of Hollywood’s relationship with civil disobedience

Imagine reducing the defining moment in the history of the American left after the New Deal to bickering over haircuts. I’m furious.

The radical left — from John Brown to Emma Goldman to the Black Panthers — is barely taught in this country‘s history curriculum in the first place. To gather an all-star cast to patronize to us about it is a travesty.

“The Trial of the Chicago 7”: the most apolitical “political” movie of the fucking century. It’s the equivalent of a “Crossfire” segment. https://twitter.com/bkrewind/status/1320563955039952897?s=20

I love JGL, but casting him as a more sympathetic figure than Schultz is some Lincoln Project-ass fantasizing about what “moderation” looks like in this country

Lol they dressed Tom Hayden in a pea coat and saddlebag like a Berkeley-educated Holden frigging Caulfield

So telling that Sorkin decided not to illustrate the events in Chicago in ‘68, but rather the trial over it. There’s a kind of credulousness about the rule of law embedded in that decision, despite the fact that the entire movement was about about when law/politics fall short.

The Dellinger moment is the first in the film I have been unironically rapt — “thug” is such a pungent description of Judge Hoffman — and it’s immediately deflated by Hayden’s daises-and-Pentagon smugness

Aaron Sorkin has convinced himself that the only form of political action left in this country is a preening monologue

The defining example of this film’s politics is letting Kunstler levy Schultz’s cross-examination of Hayden: Instead of framing it as a political attack, it tacitly supports the notion that Hayden calling out the police brutality — not the brutality itself — caused the riots.

Lord, it’s so incredibly like Sorkin to reduce the entire trial to a question of forgotten pronouns and misplaced modifiers, please shoot me in MY fucking face

Abbie Hoffman, institutionalist!

That brief recitation of “The whole world is watching!” between the soaring strings and the end credits is the filling to the perfect shit sandwich of centrist handwringing that is Sorkin’s horrifyingly simplistic “historical” drama. Read a book!

If you enjoyed my “Trial of the Chicago 7” thread, here are several thousand more words I once wrote about Aaron Sorkin’s moral compass: https://brightlightsfilm.com/talk-is-cheap-on-aaron-sorkins-moral-compass/