The Conspirator is yet another film in the category of too-little-too-late. It’s a shame Robert Redford gave us Lions for Lambs in 2007 and not this film. Lions was too heavy-handed and spent more time sympathizing with the victims of unnecessary conflict rather than chastising the creators of the conflict. The Conspirator, chronicling the post Civil War frenzy for vengeance in the name of justice, is a much better parallel to the events and consequences of 9/11. Nine years and another administration after the fact, however, the artistic power of shaming violent actions in the name of justice is lost. Who are we critiquing here? The Bush administration for pushing war in Iraq? May as well be attacking the Johnson administration post-Lincoln. At this point, it amounts to little more than the same.
James McAvoy plays Frederick Aiken, Esq. , the attorney assigned to defend Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the woman in whose boarding house the plans to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln were made. Is she guilty? Does it matter? Of course it matters. Here’s a woman who was tried in the press and found guilty. She then is held accountable in a military tribunal. The courtroom is rife with the bloodthirsty need for vengeance. We know this feeling. This is exactly how the country felt in the wake of 9/11. I can only imagine it is how we felt after President Kennedy was killed by whomever he was killed by. Even the most right wing viewer out there has to come to the conclusion, “why even have a trial?” And there’s something awful within the idea that Mary Surratt was not tried by her peers. If 1860s Virginian housewives find her guilty, I have no problem believing the system works.
Strangely, the story is not Surratt’s, but Aiken’s. We follow the attorney, not the accused. Thus, the terms of the film ask not quite, “what is justice?” but instead, “how can a professed bastion, nay champion of justice, the United States of America, fail to deliver said justice at such a critical time in our history?” This is the question we should have been asking ourselves for a decade.
I’m always intrigued when non-Americans [read: fer’ners] play highly-charged American political roles – Anthony Hopkins as Nixon, Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams (Amistad), Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin (The Patriot). And now James McAvoy as the lawyer who defended Mary Surratt who may, or more likely may not, have been involved in the assassination of a President. Don’t know quite what to make of it other than equating it to the fact that Canadian hockey players rarely choose to play on Canadian NHL teams; just too much pressure involved.
Rated PG-13, 122 Minutes
D: Robert Redford
W: James Solomon and Gregory Bernstein
Genre: Civil war revisionism
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Fans of due process
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who only pretend to know what “being a constitutionalist” means
