San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
Wright and McAvoy, at their most formulaic
That’s because it’s the standard courtroom movie that we’ve seen time and time again, with different actors in different time periods. Think Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Think Matthew McConaughey in Amistad. Think Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. And now you can add to that list James McAvoy in Robert Redford’s new film, The Conspirator, which opens Friday, April 15, at Horton Plaza, Fashion Valley and La Jolla Village Cinemas.
Redford uses The Conspirator to draw parallels between injustices that occurred following Abraham Lincoln’s death to those that have gone down in the name of preventing terrorism. That’s all very well and noble, but good intentions aren’t enough to turn The Conspirator into a good movie. Instead, the conspiracy to assassinate one of the greatest presidents in American history gets reduced to a John Grisham-style affair.
We all know that shortly after the end of the war, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln and was later murdered himself. What you may not remember is that several of his co-conspirators were arrested and tried in military tribunals and that one of the accused was Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house frequented by a number of her fellow arrestees and whose son, John Surratt, went on the lam shortly before the assassination. The Conspirator contends that Mary Surratt (Robin Wright, in what someone clearly hoped was an award-garnering role) was put on trial in an attempt to smoke out her son and that the whole thing was orchestrated with Mephistophelian genius by Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline). Stanton, secretary of the War Department, weaseled his way into more power after Lincoln’s death and determined that what the country needed to see some was good ol’ eye-for-an-eye action.
James McAvoy plays Frederick Aiken, the formulaic young lawyer, who’s returned to Washington to establish a law practice in the wake of his heroic exploits on the Civil War battlefield. Like in all good lawyer movies, Aiken doesn’t even want the case. He loved Lincoln, after all, and thinks Mary is guilty and should pay for her crime. But his boss, Sen. Reverdy Johnson, puts him on the case because he believes that everyone, including Mary Surratt, deserves a fair trial.
This puts Aiken in quite a quandary. His client doesn’t want to help him because she’s protecting her son.
The government doesn’t want him to even try to win the case. And his friends (James Badge Dale and Justin Long) and his girlfriend (Alexis Bledel) distance themselves from the societal taint that now hangs on him.
The thing is, in his jailhouse conversations with Mary, Aiken starts to think that maybe she wasn’t involved in the plot and that the government’s case is built mostly on corrupt witnesses trying to save their own skin—and that, you know, we all deserve a fair trial and justice must be served.
The problem with The Conspirator isn’t the subject matter; it’s the bland and hammy filmmaking. Though McAvoy’s performance is quite engaging, most of the other actors are playing caricatures rather than characters. Long, in particular, as Aiken’s war buddy, is doing something more appropriate for a Drew Barrymore romantic comedy than a historical enactment with contemporary social commentary.
Redford’s trying to show that not only did the government shred civil liberties immediately after 9/11; it has a long, rich history of doing so in times of national crisis—to which most of us say, “Well, duh.” We’ve witnessed Guantanamo, wire-tapping, military tribunals, rendition and, hell, Iraq.
There’s little I dislike more than a film that tries to make your mind up for you, and that’s precisely what The Conspirator attempts to do: tell you what’s right and point you in the right (or, in this case, left) direction.
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