Unforgiven

The Conspirator. Written by James D. Solomon & Gregory Bernstein. Directed by Robert Redford.

Robert Redford’s eighth outing as a director is perhaps the clearest case in years of a movie justified by its noble intentions. The Conspirator tells the largely forgotten story of the messy aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, when the circle of John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices was prosecuted in closed military tribunals. The film is epically topical: though it was completed in 2010, it has reached screens in the US in time for the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War—not to mention a series of disheartening developments about new military tribunals of accused terrorists at Gitmo, the prison that refuses to die. If more people actually cared about history and current events, The Conspirator might be taken as a hot ticket.

            The “conspirator” in question is a sympathetic, virtually silent 42 year-old widow and mother named Mary Surratt (Robin Wright).  Surratt was tried for complicity in the assassination, but her real crime was begetting John Surratt (Johnny Simmons), the last of the Booth co-conspirators to be caught. As Redford and screenwriters James Solomon and Gregory Bernstein recount it, her fate was largely preordained by the rabidly anti-South Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), who hand-picked the judges, fixed the rules, and rigged the sentence. Mary is nevertheless defended tenaciously by novice lawyer Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), a 27 year-old army veteran who, alas, gets a bitter lesson on the real nature of the system he fought for on the battlefield.

            This subject matter would seem to demand a forensic testoster-fest, with titans flinging rhetorical broadsides a la A Few Good Men, albeit with unkempt beards and pointy accoutrements. And indeed, some of the dialog sounds suspiciously like it was cribbed whole from Bruce Beresford’s even more high-octane military court tragedy, Breaker Morant (1980).

            In this struggle McAvoy, though likeable, seems to be fighting a bit above his weight class. He’s supposed to be only 27 at the outset of the trial—and McAvoy plays him as such. But 27 then was not the same as 27 now. A male at that age in 1865 was a man in full, fully expected to participate in the civic affairs of the nation. A 27 year-old today is barely expected to have moved out of his parents’ basement.

            Redford’s heart isn’t really into Aiken’s story or the rhetorical fireworks anyway. Instead, his camera prefers to linger on the wan, laconic Robin Wright, who plays her role inertly but picture-perfectly, the Pieta of maternal dignity under assault. It’s a chilly performance, but at least deserves recognition for transcending the shouty, declarative acting style of her former husband, Sean Penn. It is the one truly extraordinary thing about this film.

            Redford and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel drape Wright with courtroom air thick with smoke and scandal. Yet despite the murky atmosphere, The Conspirator is largely without subtext or nuance. The most telling detail comes at the very end, when a title comes up explaining that Aiken left the law right after Surrat’s trial to join the editorial staff of the fledgling Washington Post—the paper Redford’s character Bob Woodward worked for in All the King’s Men. By this, Redford seems to suggest that, like slavery and the Civil War itself, the railroading of Mary Surratt was one of America’s original sins, whose legacy (Watergate, for example) we are still coping with today.

             Despite its stately tone and lofty ideals, the film pointedly avoids any mention of the word “slavery”, even though the real Surratt family was indeed a slaveholding one, and more than willing to fight for their peculiar institution. In this, Redford seems to be playing right into hands of those who prefer to remember the Civil War as a “reasonable folks can disagree” dispute over the limits of state vs. federal power. It wasn’t.

            In the movie, Kline’s Edwin Stanton rather lamely excuses the hasty military trials as somehow necessary to “healing” of the nation after a crime that was, like 9/11, inconceivable in its time. The take home message, of course, is that current Secretary of Defense Bill Gates will likewise be compelled to pull the strings at the coming Gitmo tribunals of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and others. Be that as it may, the fact that all this happened before—the hysteria, the demagoguery, the tribunals—ironically offers something other than the cautionary tale Redford wants to tell. After all, it did all happen before, but the Republic didn’t collapse in a lawless heap. Maybe our ideals are tough enough to survive our failings after all.

 © 2011 Nicholas Nicastro