Chris Pizzello/AP Photo
Director Aaron Sorkin is interviewed before the drive-in premiere of ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7,’ October 13, 2020, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.
Aaron Sorkin’s movie about the whacked-out conspiracy trial prosecuted by Richard Nixon’s Justice Department charging eight (later seven) men with organizing protests at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention crosses historical lines to incite a fairy tale. To certify that the good guys win in the end, Sorkin flattens the bulging mess of history and ignores the flaws in the whole protest project, both the “Festival of Life” envisioned by the Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the street demonstrations planned by the politicos Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and Dave Dellinger. If The Trial of the Chicago 7 can be viewed as (in the words of founding Yippie Judy Gumbo) a kind of valentine in which “the Yippies and the anti-war movement come off as heroes,” it does so by depicting better angels stripped of their demons. That the mayhem in the streets might help Richard Nixon win the coming election is not a thought breathed by anyone in the movie. But here the movie is true to life, for astoundingly, no one in the New Left was thinking that far ahead.
First things first: facts. Along the yellow brick road of good intentions, Trial is cluttered with misinformation, some gratuitous, some grotesque, some pandering. Sorkin defends his movie as “a painting,” not a “photograph”—how could a movie be a photograph anyway?—and many are the liberties that artists may take for aesthetic purposes. But a painting also needs to stand up to scrutiny about color, shading, and composition. Again and again, Sorkin smooths down the barbarism of the police and marshals. Days of street fighting and tear gas are compressed into a single scene (weirdly placed at night, when it actually took place in broad daylight). We see Chicago cops take off their name tags but do not see them filling their skintight leather gloves with bird shot and going after Rennie Davis, speaking at the Grant Park band shell rally, with chants of “Kill Davis” as they crack his skull.
Sorkin misrepresents motivation. His most grievous distortion is that Sorkin’s defendants are exercised mainly by the draft and the deaths of American soldiers, when in fact they were moved most of all by outrage and anguish at the violence the United States unleashed upon Vietnam. In the tear-jerking set piece that ends the movie, it’s a roll call of dead Americans, compiled by Davis, that tears at the heartstrings, when in fact Vietnamese names were also spoken, and the reading, which took place earlier in the trial, was cut off by the judge. Sorkin, in his usual breakneck style, omits Davis’s three days of testimony about American war crimes.
The movie’s Davis is altogether diminished in both look and style, saddled with the demeanor of a timid high school boy. Indeed, the defendants are rendered as nice boys wanting nice things. Jerry Rubin is a playful lightweight, lured by a blond honeypot working for the FBI. (In fact, Rubin was bodyguarded by a beefy male undercover cop.) The actual Rubin told a press conference that the Yippies had dosed the water supply—“a dangerous prank in an already paranoid city,” in the words of Jack Newfield, the radical journalist who attended the press conference for the Village Voice. The quality of Rubin’s thinking is illustrated by something he told Newfield, who supported Bobby Kennedy that spring: “Your pal Bobby is just a rich bastard. He’s not really against the war. Bobby, Johnson, and Humphrey are the same person.” After Kennedy was murdered, the actual Rubin jumped up on the stage after the radical folk singer Phil Ochs had dedicated a song to the martyred Kennedy, shouting that the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was “a freedom fighter.” Newfield, a sober politico, found Rubin “egomaniacal, antidemocratic, nasty, self-promoting, liberal-baiting, intolerant, and anti-intellectual … a buffoon pretending to lead a revolution.”
In the movie as at the trial, the flagrantly prejudicial judge, Julius Hoffman (rendered with imposing but untrue-to-life sobriety by Frank Langella), orders Bobby Seale bound and gagged for demanding his own lawyer. As the movie does not show, Seale was chained not once but for four days running as he shouted through a tight gag and a pressure bandage, “I demand my constitutional right to defend myself.” “On the fourth day,” says Davis, who in actuality was seated next to Seale at the defendant’s table, “I could see blood coming out of the side of Bobby’s mouth.” Why sanitize that?
The movie Sorkinizes the gentle Dave Dellinger into a pugilist who punches out a U.S. marshal. The actual Dellinger was an absolute pacifist with decades of nonviolent experience, including a prison term as a World War II conscientious objector. In fact, in the words of the organizer Frank Joyce, “during the entire trial there was only one person, to my knowledge, who did physically assault any marshal in the courtroom. That person was me.” Joyce recalls that several activists “decided to deliberately create a disruption in the courtroom. The idea was that the marshals would most likely overreact, and the jury would see in miniature before their very eyes the point we were making about the overreaction of the police during our demonstrations. Sure enough, the marshals went nuts. One of them started whaling on one of the women staff members several rows ahead of me. I leaped over to try to pull him off her.” Meanwhile, a prosecutor is Sorkinized into a reluctant villain, more ambivalent than malevolent.
Sorkin’s defendants are exercised mainly by the draft and the deaths of American soldiers, when in fact they were moved most of all by the violence the United States unleashed upon Vietnam.
To keep things nice, Sorkin also pares down the supercharged Tom Hayden, the most compelling and eloquent white leader the student movement produced—and during the years 1967–1970 one of the most erratic—into an earnest clean-shaven youth who believes in elections. Hayden was vastly, and fascinatingly, more complicated. He was coming politically unstuck under the strain of his visits to Vietnam and political repression in Newark, where he organized for three years in a poor Black community. In June 1967, he told me that the strategy should now be to “arouse the sleeping dogs of the right.” The brutal crackdown of the Newark rebellion in July 1967—26 people killed by the police, hundreds injured—inflamed him further. It was necessary, he told me years later, “to make a cold calculation … to raise the internal cost to such a high level that those decision-makers who only deal in cost-effectiveness terms have to get out of Vietnam.” But in May 1968, he told Newfield that “a vote for George Wallace would further my objective more than a vote for Bobby Kennedy.” Once he told me that Kennedy was “a little fascist”; other times, Kennedy cultivated him, and the cultivation was mutual; he thought Kennedy might prove the redeemer who would at long last end the war. When Kennedy was murdered—martyred—having just defeated Eugene McCarthy in California’s Democratic primary, so expired any such hope. From then on, desperate, Hayden was hell-bent on disruption in Chicago—“arousing the sleeping dogs,” along with their human masters.
Even as SDS hard-liners, unable to keep up, imagined that Hayden was hoping to lead the New Left into the Democratic Party—SDS therefore refused to endorse the protest—some activists rightly suspected that Hayden’s deeper intention was to set a trap for Chicago’s brutal mayor and his police by producing a sort of reality-theater piece to prove to the whole world—which was indeed watching—that the American war was so vile and (finally) unpopular it could only be defended by conspicuous force. The point was to kill the legitimacy of the party. That was as far ahead as he, or any of the other organizers, was thinking.
Toward that end, Hayden was willing to manipulate unknowing demonstrators, even as other organizers resisted his cavalier suggestions of awful collisions to come. Before the police assaulted the Grant Park band shell on the Wednesday of that week, and with the Hilton Hotel surrounded by armed legions, he recorded a tape and passed it to Jack Newfield and another New Left friend, the journalist Paul Cowan, along with the McCarthy speechwriter Paul Gorman, instructing them to play it, amplified, out the 15th-floor window where the McCarthy campaign was headquartered. They decided to listen to it first. This is what they heard: “This is Tom Hayden. I got past the pigs. I’m inside the Hilton. Join me. Join me.” They decided not to blast that message out the window, very likely saving lives. Newfield later called it “a trick invitation to a massacre.”
Only after the Chicago trial did Hayden launch into an impressively broad-based—and successful—Indochina Peace Campaign designed to convert Congress to oppose Vietnam appropriations. Later still, he cast his lot with electoral politics, serving in the California legislature for 18 years, often to very good effect, though he was not always able to live down his firebrand baggage.
But the movie Hayden, to keep up his rep as a goody two-shoes, complains to Abbie that “for the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re gonna think of you. They’re gonna think of you and your idiot followers passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon. They’re not going to think of equality or justice … They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foulmouthed, lawless losers, and so we’ll lose elections.” No way. In truth, aside from supporters of the quixotic anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, some of whom the cops smashed up on the streets along with the radicals, electoral politics were far from the mind of the street crowds.
The actual Abbie was reckless but no dope. He had a serious theory of comic disruptive change as well as a need to seize the spotlight.
Absurdly, the cardboard Hayden needs to be lectured by Abbie that the trial is political. This Hayden accuses Abbie of caring more about cultural revolution than ending the war—a false and insulting charge. Hoffman, a brilliant provocateur who burned with what the psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook calls “manic fire,” does get the movie’s best one-liners (as he deserves), but Sorkin’s Sasha Baron Cohen diminishes him into a mere jokester. The actual Abbie was reckless but no dope. He had a serious theory of comic disruptive change as well as a need to seize the spotlight. He imagined hippies transforming the world by sheer libertine extravagance. Yet for the sake of cartoonish reconciliation, Sorkin has Abbie answer a prosecutor’s question about “overthrowing the government” by saying, “In this country, we do that every four years.”
Judy Gumbo has called the Sorkin film “that major motion picture Abbie Hoffman lusted after—and a gift to all resistors.” At best, it’s minor—the characterizations too thin, the all-suffusing political atmosphere not tense or horrible enough. No one on the Chicago streets that August week was unaware of the murder of Martin Luther King just the previous April, followed by Mayor Daley’s order during an ensuing riot, “Shoot to kill arsonists, shoot to maim looters”; or of the police assault on a totally peaceful anti-war march that month; or of the murder of Bobby Kennedy in June; or of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, to crush the liberal-social efflorescence of the Prague Spring. America was boiling.
Sorkin’s world is lukewarm. The moral is: You can beat the system even at a ridiculous trial. In the movie as in reality, no one in the radical leadership stopped to think that the bloody streets of Chicago might help elect Richard Nixon, who proceeded to prolong the war for five more years, killing hundreds of thousands more in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, along with 21,000 American soldiers. To contemplate such a denouement would require a depth of historical and political imagination—of tragic imagination—beyond even the most major of Hollywood’s motion pictures.
