Daguerreotype Noir
Hollywood hipsters frequently refer to two 1970s Robert Redford films—All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor—as if they were the summit of political signification. Now, with The Conspirator, Redford himself seems to believe his own legend; he has joined his knuckle-headed, self-righteous progeny—George Clooney, Sean Penn and Matt Damon—by directing a film that is as dull as it is politically hip. Redford’s The Conspirator alludes to contemporary political controversy through the period story of Mary Surratt, the Washington, D.C., innkeeper who was tried and hanged in 1865 for conspiring in President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
In an extension of Liberal Hollywood skepticism (with its roots in Communist and bleeding-heart ideology), The Conspirator sanctifies any suggestion of dissent or subversion. Mary Surratt’s innocence is presumed more than it is clearly shown. (Proclaiming, "I am a Southerner, a Catholic and a devoted mother above all else," she baits Liberal distaste.) Her story unmistakably becomes Redford’s allegory for the current Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 9/11 conspirator controversy—the case of a civilian on trial in a military court.
As if righteously challenging the Patriot Act, The Conspirator drags viewers through Civil War miasma to question the 1845 government’s determined efforts to bring the Lincoln assassination mystery to a satisfying, vengeful conclusion. Mary Surratt isn’t merely a "person of interest"—as stolidly portrayed by Robin Wright, Surratt becomes a martyr.
It’s disappointing to see Redford succumb to the same liberal tactics and angled drama as the Clooney, Penn and Damon generation, who have not experienced Vietnam-era complexities but simply inherited anti-war, antigovernment narcissism. Redford had shown remarkable—lonely—intelligence in his previous directorial effort, Lions for Lambs, which examined the tumult of contemporary political antagonism plainly and humanely by arguing opposing sides of the Iraq War, so that biased journalists chose to conveniently dismiss it.
The Conspirator seeks critics’ approval, erring in its one-sided challenge to government authority: James McAvoy as Surratt’s defense attorney Fred Aiken, a young Civil War veteran and paragon of jurisprudence who battles the machinations of Kevin Kline as the zealous-to-prosecute Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a pure-evil bureaucrat.
Whereas Lions for Lambs pinpointed the motivations of Iraq War protestors (Andrew Garfield), patriotic G.Is (Michael Peña), conservative politicians (Tom Cruise) and self-serving journalists (Meryl Streep), Redford here chooses to simply vilify "the government" as a bogeyman. Yet, unlike Lions for Lambs, Redford and debut screenwriter James Solomon neglect that "the government" is made of people whose reasonings deserve to be explicated. There are no details of Southern rebel politics, only vilifying through faces— profiling, as it were.
Aiken argues that Stanton has predetermined Surratt’s fate when Redford and Solomon’s polemic has already predetermined that the KSM trial is wrong. So when the trial initially finds Surratt innocent—proving the military trial fair and correct—it takes an unnamed acting president, who signs Surratt’s death sentence, to justify Redford and Solomon’s political paranoia.
Although The Conspirator is a courtroom drama, its sanctimonious prejudice shames the way showbiz polemicists formerly sought a balance of argument. In the ’70s, the Civil Warset The Andersonville Trial was popularly analogous to the My Lai trial—a way of dramatizing a core belief in the process of justice. When Surratt is tried with seven others, The Conspirator makes brief reference to the Chicago Eight trial, another Vietnam-era touchstone. But these self-serving connections are weak; their superficial resemblance to present circumstances insult the past as well as our post-9/11 anxiety.
To portray the anxiety of wartime patriotism and politics, Redford and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel stylize the Civil War era to evoke the dark days following a national catastrophe. This muted chiaroscuro overwhelms the re-imagined justice process into facile paranoia, a sort of Daguerreotype-Noir. Pleading, "This is a frightened county. You don’t need to frighten us anymore," Aiken’s mentor (Tom Wilkinson) warns against tragedy shattering our confidence and unity. But The Conspirator abuses the same Civil War atmosphere that Jonah Hex brilliantly turned into a comic exploration of contemporary political terror and spiritual gloom. Critics failed to appreciate the expressionist ingenuity of Jonah Hex— an action film-plus, ably directed by Jimmy Hayward and written by Neveldine-Taylor, the genre-revisionist team.
Redford doesn’t revise history: not after the whipping he got for the politically incorrect, yet incisive, dialectic of Lions for Lambs. He merely asks for Liberal agreement, directing The Conspirator with obvious middlebrow intent to garner prestige (and facile, if cynical, political satisfaction). The Conspirator feels meekly tendentious. It’s talky, but the language and trial don’t carry the dramatic weight that American filmmakers should have learned from John Ford’s great exercise of trials in Young Mr. Lincoln and Sergeant Rutledge, not to mention Ford’s superior Lincoln assassination drama, The Prisoner of Shark Island—a transcendent genre film whose breath-baiting social revelations establish the tradition that Jonah Hex honored.
The Conspirator belongs to a selfrighteous tradition where issue-oriented, stick-figure characters patronize the prevailing political prejudices—usually those of the media-class. If Redford seems to be in Attorney General Eric Holder’s pocket (arguing against a military tribunal for KSM), his real allegiance is to the left of that: Redford adds a coda about Fred Aiken becoming the first city editor of The Washington Post—once again romanticizing the media, as in Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. And, once again, it’s a bore.
>>The Conspirator
Directed by Robert Redford
Runtime: 123 min.