Movie review of the day

A.O. Scott has a review of The Conspirator in The New York Times:

I happened to see The Conspirator, a new historical drama directed by Robert Redford, on the day that the Obama administration, reversing its earlier position, announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others would be tried by a military tribunal for their suspected roles in the September 11th attacks. This coincidence underscored the film’s topical relevance, which was hardly obscure to begin with. Its theme is the rule of law in the aftermath of a national tragedy, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who died on this date, 15 April, in 1865. What might have been an antiquarian courtroom drama, or a belated eruption of Bush-era civil libertarian outrage, has been given potent and painful currency by recent events.
The basic ethical and political problems are laid out as neatly as the chapter headings in a civics textbook. The murder of the president and simultaneous, coordinated attempts on the lives of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward throws Washington into panic. After John Wilkes Booth is killed in a shootout with soldiers, his fellow plotters are arrested and tried, not by a jury of their peers but by a committee of officers.
Among those on trial is Mary Surratt, played by Robin Wright, a widow whose boarding house was a meeting place for the conspirators and whose son John, played by Johnny Simmons, appears to have been one of their number. On trial for her life, Mary is defended by Frederick Aiken, played by James McAvoy, a decommissioned captain in the Union Army. An ambitious young lawyer, Aiken is initially reluctant to be the advocate of a suspected traitor, but he is cajoled into taking the assignment by Reverdy Johnson, played by Tom Wilkinson, a powerful Democratic senator from Maryland. And as he becomes acquainted with Mary and her daughter, Anna, played by Evan Rachel Wood, Aiken becomes passionately dedicated to proving Mary’s innocence, or at least saving her life.
He finds, though, that the deck is stacked, and the audience may feel the same way, in spite of the movie’s show of fidelity to the historical record. The chief prosecutor, Joseph Holt, is played by Danny Huston, whose silken baritone and crooked smile are so immediately indicative of duplicity that the filmmakers might as well have cast a talking snake. Colm Meaney, as the head of the tribunal, is less sinister but hardly sympathetic and the behind-the-scenes heavy, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, is portrayed by Kevin Kline with stiff and stagey malevolence. With his tight, unsmiling mouth and severe parson’s beard, Stanton is an authoritarian bogeyman (a mean Republican!) designed to scare modern liberals. His defense of the political efficacy and moral necessity of fear-mongering is balanced, weakly, by evocations of the grief-stricken, traumatized state of the nation in the wake of war and political terror. But rather than trust the audience’s ability to think through the thorny historical and ideological issues at the heart of the story, Mr. Redford and the screenwriter, James Solomon, descend, perhaps inadvertently, into Confederate apologetics. The triumphant North is represented by bullying, brass-fronted soldiers; imperious bureaucrats; or smug, wine-sipping swells, like Aiken’s old comrades (Justin Long and James Badge Dale) and his socially anxious wife (Alexis Bledel).
The South, in contrast, is embodied by the stoical Mary Surratt and her passionate daughter and also, more tellingly, by the other accused assassins, a bunch of taciturn, soulful fellows who sit in the dock like a country-and-western house band resting up before a set with Waylon Jennings. They are so cool, and their tears on the gallows so moving! Well and good; Dixie sentimentality is woven into the fabric of American culture. But it is curious that The Conspirator, while it includes a scene in which Mary speaks with tragic, misty eloquence about “the Cause”, declines to note, even in passing, that her cause was the defense of a way of life built on the labor of human chattel. If you think I’m nit-picking or being politically correct, try to imagine a movie about the Nuremburg trials that never mentioned Jews, or a film about modern terrorism from which the word Islam was banished.
The omission matters because it undermines the film’s integrity, helping to turn what might have been a vivid and thoughtful ethical drama into a flat, tendentious history lecture. Ms. Wright, usually a surpassingly subtle actress with impressive emotional range, seems to have based this performance almost entirely on old photographs. But her stillness is mystifying rather than enigmatic, and it is hard to feel anything but the most abstract pity for Mary.
Mr. McAvoy, as usual, is very busy and demonstrative, without registering much of an impression, and the rest of the cast cannot quite dispel the atmosphere of theme park pageantry that infuses nearly every scene. The obtrusive cinematography, by Newton Thomas Sigel, only makes matters worse.
“Mrs. Lincoln prefers a night at the theater,” someone says at the beginning; a ham-handed bit of foreshadowing that is sadly typical of the film’s dialogue. But even that first lady might have grown impatient with The Conspirator, and not only because the subject matter might have been personally painful. The few glimpses we catch of the Ford’s Theater production of Our American Cousin are unfortunately the liveliest and most convincing moments in this well-meaning, misbegotten movie.

Rico says he was looking forward to seeing this one, but maybe not...