Monthly Archives: October 2020

  • The Trial of the Chicago 7

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aaron Sorkin (2020)

    As the title suggests, much of Aaron Sorkin’s new film comprises courtroom proceedings.  Sticking to the actual trial transcripts for these sequences – assuming that’s what he did – must have been quite a discipline for Sorkin, who loves the sound of his own writing voice.  He does, though, give himself increasing rein as the trial nears its climax, and the balance of screen time starts to shift towards behind-the-scenes debates and disputes among the seven defendants and their legal team.  This is the second feature Sorkin has directed, and it’s considerably better than the first, Molly’s Game (2017), thanks in no small part to the subject matter.  But it’s not exciting or imaginative film-making.  Nor is it – I can already say this – at all memorable.

    The defendants in the famous trial, which began in September 1969 and ended in February 1970, were charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where they organised anti-Vietnam War protests.  For much of the five months of the trial, they were the Chicago 8 – Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Lee Weiner, John Froines and Bobby Seale.  Their ages ranged from late twenties (Davis) to mid-fifties (Dellinger).  Their political affiliations and approaches were various, too.  Hayden and Davis were activists in the national Student Democratic Society, Hoffman and Rubin leading lights of the Youth International Party:  the Yippies, as they were known, had a broader countercultural agenda and, in the case of Hoffman anyway, expressed their radicalism more flamboyantly.  Seale co-founded the Black Panthers.  Three months into proceedings, in December 1969, his case was declared a mistrial.  And then there were seven.

    At one point of Sorkin’s film Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) reassures Weiner (Noah Robbins) and Froines (Daniel Flaherty) that they’re in the dock only so that they can be found not guilty and thus help create the false impression of a fair trial.  Weiner and Froines were, indeed, acquitted on both counts.  Each of the others was found not guilty of conspiracy but guilty of inciting a riot.  The presiding judge, Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie, as Sorkin has the latter point out), imposed the maximum penalty, including a five-year prison term, on all concerned.  When the case went to appeal, in November 1972, the convictions were reversed.  The grounds for the Court of Appeal decision included that the judge had shown prejudice in refusing to allow defence attorneys to screen prospective jurors for racial or cultural bias.  Judge Hoffman’s conduct of proceedings was notorious in several respects, including the numerous contempt charges he handed down to the defendants and their attorneys.  These charges were eventually heard by a different judge, who returned guilty verdicts in some cases, but imposed no jail sentences or fines.

    Indictments arising from events at the Democratic Convention weren’t returned until after the Nixon administration took office in January 1969:  Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, had taken the view that the violence in Chicago resulted largely from police mishandling of the protests taking place.  A preface to the film’s main action suggests the decision to press charges came about because John Mitchell (John Doman), Richard Nixon’s new Attorney General, had taken umbrage at Ramsey Clark’s conduct during the handover process.  It’s a grimly amusing notion that the very big deal the trial became had its origins in, as much as a political agenda, a perceived personal slight.  There’s not much scope, of course, for sustaining this idea through what follows – except in the persisting air of unease of Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt), the straight-arrow federal prosecutor appointed by Mitchell.

    Sorkin sets the scene with a zippy montage of news film, summarising key events in America’s involvement in Vietnam up to and including the protests at the Convention in August 1968.  The narrative that follows is competently handled but The Trial of the Chicago 7 often has the thinness of reconstruction.  The film deals with what might be seen as a flashpoint in American culture wars of the period.  It depends for substance on the viewer’s making a connection between the late 1960s and the politically riven now:  Sorkin expects his audience to realise the issues being played out on screen are-just-as-relevant-today.  And so we do – especially the race issues reflected in confrontations between Bobby Seale (Yahla Abdul-Mateen II) and Judge Hoffman (Frank Langella).  On the judge’s orders, Seale, having been beaten in a cell, is returned to court gagged and chained.  It’s as well that Judge Hoffman accepts Schultz’s motion to declare Seale’s case a mistrial before the mistreatment to which he’s subjected takes over the story.  It’s also worth noting that Yahla Abdul-Mateen and Frank Langella are oddly well matched as these two antagonists.  Their performances share a self-important quality.

    Sorkin has assembled a surprising collection of actors for the main parts.  As Tom Hayden, Eddie Redmayne seems to be speaking in someone else’s voice but his college-boy neatness is right for the film’s conception of Hayden, and Redmayne gradually works his way inside the character.  In the livelier role of Hayden’s political and temperamental opposite, Sacha Baron Cohen turns Abbie Hoffman into a hollow showoff.  It seems surprising that Sorkin means to dismiss Hoffman in these terms.  One’s suspicion that the hollowness comes from the actor rather than the man he’s playing is confirmed when Hoffman finally gives evidence in court and undergoes a character change in the witness box:  his sudden sincerity comes over as bombast, too.  (In making the transition feel phony, Baron Cohen gives Sorkin what he probably deserves.)  John Carroll Lynch is good as the decent, sometimes comically impassioned David Dellinger.  The other defendants are played by Jeremy Strong (Rubin) and Alex Sharp (Davis).  I already can’t remember anything about them.

    As William Kunstler, the chief defence attorney, Mark Rylance isn’t at his most inspired but still stands out, thanks especially to some inventive hand gestures.  The film, though it’s always entertaining, moves up a level when Kunstler and his colleague Leonard Weinglass (Ben Shenkman) approach Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton, excellent) about giving evidence, and in Clark’s subsequent court testimony.  This is a voir dire session only:  Judge Hoffman then decides to refuse to let the jury hear from Clark.  It’s a curious feature of The Trial of the Chicago 7 that the technical legal issues are more absorbing than the central political drama.  Sorkin keeps inserting into his flashback reconstructions of what happened in Chicago snippets of black-and-white footage of the actual events.  He may think this ‘cinematic’ but it comes across more as a lack of self-confidence.  It’s as if he feels the audience needs these reminders that the riot really happened.

    Before sentencing, the judge invites Tom Hayden to say a few words on his and the others’ behalf – and, by speaking briefly and moderately, to minimise his own sentence.  Hayden replies by reading out the names of the more than 4,500 soldiers that have died in Vietnam since the trial began.  Hayden ignores the judge’s repeated objections as he proceeds with the roll call.  It’s harder for Eddie Redmayne to drown out Daniel Pemberton’s swelling elegiac music, which Sorkin decides should accompany this big finish, and which just about ruins it.

    20 October 2020

  • After Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aleem Khan (2020)

    A devoted wife, recently widowed, discovers that her late husband had a secret life with another woman.  Writer-director Aleem Khan’s After Love, which screened at the London Film Festival, revitalises this familiar storyline – through cultural specificity and a superb performance from the versatile, fearless Joanna Scanlan.

    In the opening sequence, Fahima Hussain (Scanlan) and her British-Pakistani husband Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia) return to their Dover home after attending the aqiqah ­of a friend’s new grandchild.  (The aqiqah ceremony – a kind of post-natal baby shower – welcomes a Muslim newborn into the world.)  Fahima chats easily with Ahmed as she puts food in the fridge and makes tea.  Her husband goes into the living room and puts on music.  Unlike his wife’s face, Ahmed’s, even in the kitchen, is in shadow and hard to make out.  Once he sits in a chair in the living room, in the background of the frame, only his legs are visible.  Khan barely moves the camera throughout all this.  Although nothing apparently remarkable is happening, the unchanging shot pulls the viewer in, and thereby increases the impact of the scene’s climax.  When Fahima moves to the living room she finds Ahmed dead in his armchair.  The absorbing domestic normality is extinguished, silently and absolutely.

    Khan is succinct in situating Fahima in the subsequent ritual of mourning.  A large figure in white robes, she’s physically at its centre, flanked by dark-clothed women from Ahmed’s family.  Unlike them, she’s quiet and almost dry-eyed in expressing her grief.  After the funeral, Fahima sorts through her husband’s things.  She’s puzzled to find in his wallet the identity card of a French woman called Geneviève.  Fahima looks at the messages on Ahmed’s phone, and discovers texts exchanged with a woman of the same name.  Khan next shows Fahima on board a ferry, looking back to England.  The style of After Love changes sharply at this point, as Fahima sees part of the white cliffs of Dover collapse symbolically into the sea.

    Ahmed worked on the Dover-Calais ferries, and Geneviève lives in Calais.  Fahima books into a small Calais hotel and soon turns up at Geneviève’s house.  By coincidence, she’s moving elsewhere at the end of the week, and needs help with clearing out and packing up.  She assumes the unknown woman on her doorstep is the agency help she’s requested.  Until she converted to Islam and married Ahmed, Fahima’s name was Mary – the name she now gives when Geneviève asks for one.  (I’ll refer to her as Mary henceforth.)  By taking advantage of the crossed wires as to who she is, Mary gains access to the house for several days and discovers more about her husband’s secret life.  Its chief and most startling manifestation is Solomon (Talid Ariss) – Ahmed and Geneviève’s teenage son.

    Visual departures from reality like the collapsing cliffs are rare in the rest of After Love but it might be objected that the plotting, from the point that Mary travels to France, strains credibility.  I believed what was happening thanks to Aleem Khan’s skilful writing, and his lead player.  Mary is that rare screen character – someone whose isolation isn’t just a matter of convenience to the film-maker but is properly rooted in her particular identity.  Mary and Ahmed were teenage sweethearts.  Khan doesn’t need to make a big deal of their families’ opposition for the audience to believe how controversial an interracial relationship would have been in England forty-odd years ago.  Mary is now a childless woman in her late fifties.  Her social life is in the ethnic community into which she married.  She naturally assumes that none of Ahmed’s family knew his secret.  She really does have no one to confide in.

    Mary’s progress to Geneviève’s front door is persuasively tentative.  When she first phones Geneviève’s number and hears her voice, she can’t speak and the call ends.  In her hotel room mirror Mary practices introducing herself; when the moment actually arrives she’s again struck dumb.   It’s because she’s tongue-tied that Mary initially fails to correct Geneviève’s misunderstanding; because Geneviève is impatient and fast-talking she gives Mary time to realise the potential of subterfuge (which Joanna Scanlan’s face subtly registers).  It’s plausible, too, that Geneviève isn’t curious as to why a hijab-wearing British woman who speaks no French is working as an agency cleaner in Calais.  Geneviève, preoccupied with the imminent move, sees Mary as a means to that end.  Mary is very soon making herself useful.  That’s all Geneviève needs.

    And Joanna Scanlan’s eloquence is all the viewer needs to feel the weight on Mary of Ahmed’s betrayal.  For love of him, she made the transition to an alien religious tradition and a family life based in it.  In a foreign country just twenty-odd miles from his and Mary’s home, he’s had a second life not only secret but also secular.  Svelte, smart-casual Geneviève, who drinks, smokes and speaks good English, perfectly embodies this other world.  In the privacy of the hotel room Mary is emotionally and physically uncovered.  Even from a position of prostrate prayer her movement into abject sobbing is a remarkable collapse.  She examines her overweight body, particularly its stretch marks.  Later on, she looks at a photograph of her and Ahmed’s younger selves, with a baby.  Aleem Khan shows a sure and sensitive touch in revealing that Mary and Geneviève have motherhood in common, or, at least, had.  Mary and Ahmed’s only child died at four months old.

    Thirty-five-year-old Khan, whose first feature this is (he’s written and directed three short films), has worked things out with care.  Elements which are hard to swallow at first come to make sense.  For example, Geneviève continues sending texts to Ahmed, which go unanswered though not unseen by his widow.  It’s puzzling that Geneviève doesn’t show more than mild irritation at this until she mentions to Mary that Ahmed is bad at keeping in touch and ‘hardly ever here’.  Because of that, Geneviève sees other men – a source of considerable friction between her and Solomon, who keeps angrily insisting that he wants to live with his father instead.

    After Love gradually accumulates an extensive tangle of secrets and deceptions.  Mary didn’t know of the existence of Geneviève or Solomon.  They don’t know who she really is, or that Ahmed is dead.  Solomon isn’t aware his father has a wife in England; Geneviève is, but was told by Ahmed that she’s a Pakistani (and that they’ve never had children).  Solomon, thinking the house is empty, brings another boy home from school and they start making love.  When Solomon realises Mary’s there and has seen what’s going on, he furiously, fearfully orders her not to tell his mother.  For Mary, it’s a brutal irony that keeping secrets was a necessary part of her and Ahmed’s teenage courtship.  Ahmed’s family knows nothing of his double life, or of what Mary discovers.

    Solomon’s attitude to Mary is at first scornful and surly.  The growing antipathy between him and his mother helps give credibility to his warming to Mary and responding to the questions she needs answers to.  When she asks if he’s ever been to England he tells her only once, on a school day trip to Dover Castle.  While in Dover, he tried to get away from the school party and meet up with Ahmed, who was annoyed when Solomon contacted him; Mary assures him his father was probably just worried by the idea of Solomon going off alone in a place he didn’t know.  Khan’s handling of this part of the story is well judged, too.  He and Scanlan capture the tension between Mary’s anguish that Solomon even exists, growing feelings for him, and realisation that she can go only so far.  At one point, she oversteps the mark:  Mary doesn’t respond to Geneviève’s texts to Ahmed but can’t resist replying to one from Solomon.  This affectionate response, supposedly from Ahmed, gives Solomon false hope about moving in with his father.  Mary has to abort the text conversation, distressing Solomon in the process.

    On the eve of the house move, everything chez Geneviève is boxed up and ready to go.  Solomon’s mother is out (it’s implied with her latest man); when he says he’s hungry Mary unpacks a few things and prepares them an improvised Asian meal with what comes to hand – spinach, tortillas (substituting for roti), and so on.  Solomon praises the ‘delicious’ food and, watching how Mary handles it on her plate, tells her, ‘You eat like my Dad’.  It’s a lovely scene, pregnant with meaning, but it also proves unfortunately pivotal in the narrative.  This turning point is triggered by Geneviève’s arrival home.  She’s unsurprisingly irritated to find Mary still there when her services are no longer required, as well as by Solomon’s unaccustomed enthusiasm for an evening meal.  Mother and son are soon arguing; after Geneviève rudely and petulantly disparages the food (‘Needs more salt’), Solomon spits in her face, and Mary slaps Solomon’s.  She does so instinctively yet the slap feels improbably melodramatic – it’s the first in a series of false moves.

    Solomon storms out.  Shocked and angry, Geneviève asks Mary, ‘Who do you think you are?’  She gets her answer but not until the following day when Mary turns up at the new house and reveals all.  Geneviève chucks her out, after berating Mary for her deception.  I didn’t get why this showdown hadn’t happened in the immediate aftermath of the slap – except that that would have ruled out a second showdown.  Khan curiously omits Mary’s immediate reaction to Geneviève’s tirade.  Instead, the action switches back to England.  A scene of Mary attending another aqiqah gives way to one in a cemetery, where she visits Ahmed’s grave and, beside it, the grave of their son.  She looks up to see Geneviève and Solomon standing nearby.   Next thing, these two are guests in Mary’s home.  Khan gives no clue as to how this visit, and the implicit rapprochement that enables it, have come about.

    Solomon looks through things in Mary’s house, and finds cassette-tape recordings Ahmed made for Mary when they were young.  Mary’s angry distress when she hears one of the tapes playing is short-lived.  She decides to give the recording to Solomon.  It’s because After Love is, for the most part, so convincing that the unhappiness of the story feels acutely real.  To that extent, you’re grateful for the ‘healing’ conclusion even though you don’t believe it.  That said, the final embrace between Mary and Solomon, when she’s given him the recording of Ahmed’s voice, is moving, and the closing shot – of Mary, Geneviève and Solomon standing on the Dover cliffs – effective.  As in the opening scene, the shot is held for a long time – long enough for the viewer’s mind to stray into larger thoughts about cultural transition, immigration and the distance from Calais to Dover.

    All good things come to an end:  it’s a pity that, in the case of After Love, that happens ten minutes or so before it’s actually over.  But it certainly is a good thing for most of its running time.  Finely photographed by Alexander Dynan and discreetly scored by Chris Roe, this debut feature leaves you eager to see what Aleem Khan will do next.  I wanted to watch his film at the first opportunity because I already felt that way about Joanna Scanlan – especially in light of her work in Pin Cushion (2017).  It’s an understatement to say that, after After Love, the feeling is the same.

    18 October 2020

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