The trial of Chicago 7, but is it right to make a film like this?

Available on Netflix from October 16, ready to run for the Oscars, technically perfect, the new film by Aaron Sorkin is morally very questionable, telling a true and very serious fact with comedy tones

Since the attack The Chicago 7 trial uses the weapons of comedy to make a serious film, or at least a film that works on fun, pleasantness and charm about something that, in theory, does not have charm. There is talk of Black Panthers, armed resistance, bloody repressed protests and claims against an oppressive government. It will be the figure of the whole film, Aaron Sorkin's goal (who writes and directs here) is in fact to attract, charm and buy the public. We immediately see the 7 of the title (which are then 8) in an alternate montage, driven by an excellent, very nice musical carpet in which they talk about violence, violent responses, talk about action in no uncertain terms and how a Molotov cocktail is made. . They are so funny, engaging, lovable and cool. Everything in the direction and writing covers a content that is perhaps not so fascinating with a fascinating film patina.

What is being told is the story of the Chicago Seven, the group of seven activists victim of a shameful trial for inciting riot and conspiracy in 1968, during the demonstrations during the Democratic Party Congress in Chicago. Some of them were well-known activists, others less so, all together they were taken as a symbol of those movements and tried with little respect for the right to a fair trial, after the police themselves had triggered the riots. A history of the Nixon presidency for years and evidently capable of producing an echo very in tune with the American present, which speaks of limitations to rights, of the coercive exercise of power and of little love for dissent on the part of leaders up to the need for those who are more at the bottom of fighting to rebel.

However the whole Chicago 7 trial is set on comedy techniques while not being a comedy. It's a serious film with plenty of reasons to smile, robbing comedy writing of its ability to generate empathy by polarizing characters and, occasionally, using splashes of complexity to move. On the one hand, the 8 involved in the process, illuminated by the light of the good guys, on the other the darkness of a study of bad guys who say bad and mean things with shutters lowered even during the day, without shame or turns of words. The attack on the headquarters of evil shows us an attorney general (the instigator of the whole operation) portrayed as the dean of the university in a John Landis film. As always then (another comedy technique with an empathic background), among the ranks of the bad guys there is a character who is basically positive, full of doubts, the one who confirms that the system is not all rotten and that, distancing himself from his masters, he will only ratify its incurable wickedness.

This second film as director by Aaron Sorkin is technically flawless but the idea that moves him much less. It is not difficult in fact to agree with his point of view, history has shown that the 7 were treated in unfair ways, that they were right and that the system has harassed them against all rules. However, making a true story a comic, exasperating reasons and wrongs and treating it as a fact of fiction, as if it were Forrest Gump (which was indeed set during real historical phases but had a fictional plot at times evidently imaginative) or as a Code of 'honor (another courtroom film written by Sorkin that he could afford to polarize and exaggerate because his was a fictional story, it was a metaphor for reality), puts the whole operation on highly questionable moral ground.

The point is that Aaron Sorkin, perhaps the most influential screenwriter of the last 20 years, as he often does, has made a superfine script. There are, literally, 11 protagonists and he manages to give each one a clear and recognizable personality with only a few beats each, he gives the main actors their solo without it seeming so, he shows us the events of the night in question only near the end getting a great dramatic effect (it will seem to us that the coups are wrong but we will understand that instead they are even more right), and has the ingenious idea of ​​closing by pulling the strings of the stormy relationship between the two best known actors who symbolize the two ideological factions of protests (Eddie Redmayne in the role of Tom Hayden and Sacha Baron Cohen in those of Abbie Hoffman), causing the second to surprise the first with a great economy of words and properties of language. Not to mention Michael Keaton's cameo, truly exceptional for his character's concentration of effort and epic rendition.

Sorkin uses the silences of the characters as much as their words, uses musical crescendos and makes the actors perform very well ( even Eddie Redmayne !!), uses all the arsenal of a screenwriter (and a director) to get to his point but at what price? Renouncing to make a more serious film on the subject, or a more declared comedy and therefore less faithful to reality, is deceiving. He seems to want to tell the facts as they went, with the precision that is expected from a film set in court, but then he allows himself a partial view up to the speck. Romance without mercy by distributing wrongs and reasons with the spade instead of with the brush. It does so strong in hindsight and in the awareness that history has already issued its sentence, it reduces everything to white against black, pretending to convince that the world is really divided into good and bad and that there are no reasons (some right , others wrong) on ​​both sides. That in essence the story is not so complex.

In the end The Chicago 7 trial is nothing more than the parody of American cinema, capable of ending with ovations, applause and easy tears for fallen, with the angry bad guys either screaming in anger at the good guys to stop or running away on the sly humiliated, even if in theory they would have won at that moment. Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with classic American cinema and in its sometimes Manichean way of telling cardinal virtues through invented stories. But it's a different matter when this work is done with the real story, in fact cheating and treating the audience like middle school students sitting at the back seat.