The Trial of the Chicago 7. Photo / Netflix
SCORES
Relative quality: 4
Absolute quality: 2
Gender equality: 1
SHE SAW
About 15 minutes into The Trial of the Chicago 7 I had to ask Greg to pause it and tell me what was happening - not because it was confusing but because there were so many white men doing so much talking, I just switched off, as if I was in a boardroom being mansplained to by a bunch of smug corporate know-it-alls.
Writer/director Aaron Sorkin is well known for his particular style of "snappy" dialogue. He's very finicky about it and doesn't allow actors to improvise an "um" or "ah" or even an unscripted pause. But overly wordy openings never engage me - the protracted talking is yet to have context and therefore feels abstract and hard to follow. Sorkin's highly expositional talk-heavy opening sequence didn't grab me at all.
But there's no denying this is a great story. The bizarre real-life trial of seven men charged with conspiracy and inciting riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention features a cantankerous judge, a couple of disruptive anti-establishment hippies played by Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen (whose New England accent is distractingly overstated), a Black Panther on trial without a lawyer, a boy scout leader, a couple of other guys and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
As far as entertainment goes, courtroom drama is about as much of a sure thing as you can get. The stakes are necessarily high, conflict is built-in and there's a definitive resolution filled with either elation or devastation. In other words, there's always a hugely dramatic climax. It's everything a screenwriter needs for a compelling film without having to do any of the agonising slog of trying to "break the story". For this reason, I knew early on that Greg would almost certainly like this movie but would then retrospectively rubbish it for being formulaic.
I hate to say it but Greg's right: this is formulaic storytelling - albeit at its best. And, for all Sorkin's meticulousness with dialogue, there are many lines that feel overwritten and schlocky; and jokes that fall flat. He really leans into some emotive cliches that, while they elicited the desired emotional response from me - read: involuntary welling up - also had my dampened eyeballs rolling way back into my prefrontal cortex. The film presses all the right buttons and skillfully employs a precise combination of affective scriptwriting, strong performances, deliberate camera movement and swelling music to draw you in and make you feel things but pushes no creative boundaries and ultimately leaves you uninspired.
HE SAW
The state of cinema is dire and getting worse and the essence of the problem is the screenwriting-industrial complex, in which leading gurus proffer rules of cinematic storytelling so severe they sometimes dictate the page number on which certain events must happen. The spirits of gurus like Blake Snyder and Robert McKee, with their books and screeds and egregiously expensive seminars, possess aspiring screenwriters like members of a death cult, the end goal of which is to remove uncertainty from the creative process. This suits Hollywood, which abhors few things more than uncertainty.
Zanna, who has a masters in screenwriting from the University of Auckland, is deeply enmeshed in this death cult and we have clashed many times on its philosophical underpinnings. She says people like me pop up regularly in film studies courses, arguing against three-act structure, inciting incidents, second act turning points, dark nights of the soul and related nonsense. But, she says, when they look back through cinema history for counterexamples, there's Mulholland Drive and not much else. To this, I reply, "Surely the existence and success of Mulholland Drive is evidence enough" and she says, "Yes, but you can't write Mulholland Drive until you understand structure" and I say, "Maybe" and then the whole thing peters out until our next filmic cheese platter.
But to all that I now say, enough. Maybe our brains crave the narrative complications and resolutions of three-act structure but our brains also crave novelty, which is the engine of progress, which has propelled civilisation to its current point, which, admittedly is the very edge of catastrophe - but regardless, why must storytelling remain static while everything else moves forward? For an industry whose practitioners like to call themselves creative, that feels remarkably oxymoronic.
Which brings us to this film's writer, Aaron Sorkin, arguably the highest-profile working representative of the screenwriting-industrial complex, best known for writing The Social Network, A Few Good Men and The West Wing. The problem with these works and the one at hand is not that they're objectively bad but that they're relatively good. The problem is that you can only be as interesting as the world within which you allow yourself to exist. Hollywood is just not very interesting.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is in cinemas now and streaming on Netflix from Friday, October 16.