A big-character poster by Alan Sorkin
Text | Evansey
About the author: Full-time Kumongou, part-time movie watcher. It's all about afterthought.
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At the moment when the virus is raging, Hollywood is almost at a standstill, and suddenly Netflix launched the star-studded movie "The Trial of the Chicago Seven" written and directed by Alan Sorkin. For fans, it is a good news.
The movie is naturally a good movie. The opening chapter has contributed the best movie paragraphs this year. The main characters are interspersed in the historical scenes, flowing smoothly and without deep meaning.
Full of strong Alan Sorkin style, sonorous and powerful, full of tension and huge amount of information, clever and light editing, relaxed rhythm, calm and solid narrative, full of emotion, and then poured into Suo Jinwan Political issues that have not changed in years have been boiled out of the pot. More than two hours of literary drama, without any boring and procrastination, this is the charm of the gold medal screenwriter.
The stage of the story is the 1960s, when the civil rights movement in the United States was surging. With the Vietnam War as the fuse, the New Left, the black movement, the student movement, and the hippies all entered the stage of history. ambition.
People with different positions are linked together because of a trial. They are forced to deal with the oppression of the state apparatus and struggle and resist in the face of a doomed political trial.
The original story of this story can easily be interpreted as a satire of the past. In the United States, which is currently in power with the "Knowing King", the external anti-globalization process and the internal racial issue have caused social unrest, and political divisions have become increasingly serious. Alan Sorkin's political stance is well known, and throwing out such a movie at this time is clearly aimed at the face of "Knowing the King".
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Of course, we do not have the ease of watching fire from the other side of the ocean: are hippies considered "waste youth"? Are people encouraged to take to the streets? Are dissidents a benign factor in a society?
Don't talk too much. Don't ask questions.
Speaking of movies, ordinary audiences may not know how great Aaron Sorkin is as a screenwriter, nor do they necessarily have the interest in sipping scripts and lines, but the brilliance of the actors' performances is visible to the naked eye.
The film relies on group play, and almost all the members perform at a high level, especially those who stand out such as Little Freckles, Sasha Baron Cohen, Mark Rylance, etc., and even show Oscar-level acting skills.
When a good actor encounters a good script, it will naturally trigger such a gain effect, and it does not need a particularly strong ups and downs of sadness and joy. It is precise and just right, and the characters are more vivid and vivid. A variety show in the name of "acting", study hard.
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However, in this movie, Alan Sorkin becomes and Alan Sorkin is lost.
The biggest problem is that its "Sorkin" label is so heavy that it even overshadows the movie itself. Political views, storytelling skills, and lyrical techniques, we have seen countless times in "The White House", "The Newsroom", "The Social Network", wonderful, but really lack of surprises.
This is also a common American democratic theme with a strong standpoint. There are very face-to-face villains, and there is also a clear-cut bad force that acts as a target.
In terms of character creation, Frank Langella, who is also Oscar-level, is not bad at acting, but the judges he plays are extraordinarily "thin" and "stereotypical" compared to the protagonists. Fortunately, the movie let go of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the prosecutor who was supposed to be a bad guy, and turned into a good man with principles and bottom lines, more professional than political, and a good conscience.
The movie has been accusing the trial of the "Seven Gentlemen" as a premeditated "political trial". But from a movie point of view, Alan Sorkin's existence in the movie undoubtedly plays the same role as the judge in the movie. He placed his very clear political position in the film, and then gave himself legitimacy in the name of a very correct democracy , and expressed his position with an irrefutable and incomparably correct attitude. There is no confrontation, offense and defense in the courtroom drama in the true sense, but only criticism and exposure, which is a one-sided moral victory.
This is also a "political trial" with clear motives, but the object of the trial is the Johnson government, which has become history, and the "Knowing King" whose electoral situation is now in jeopardy. And "Knowing the King" obviously doesn't know how to fight back with movies.
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From a political point of view, there is no problem with such expressions. Sorkin has the power to shoot and say whatever he wants. It's just that such a political theme comes first, which makes the film inevitably become a vassal of values and loses its objectivity.
Although objective or not is not enough to evaluate the quality of a movie, but overemphasizing the binary opposition, it reduces the heavy and epic sense of the movie. Its meaning of "borrowing the past to satirize the present" is so obvious that we prefer to Believe that this is a political show by the director, a big-character poster of his, not a pure work (Spike Lee also often has this problem).
That's why I really dislike the emotional treatment at the end of the movie - the paragraph about reading the list of dead soldiers and everyone standing up. It's very commercial, very Hollywood, very fake and cheap, all the court orders and bailiffs are gone, some are just dramatic climaxes that have been pre-arranged for a long time and finally formed a blood-sucking and tear-jerking echo. The climax is incompatible with the temperament of the whole film, the political intentions are about to come out, and the sense of reality of history is washed away.
By comparison, the ending of The Social Network seems so remarkable. Therefore, Sorkin, as a director, cannot restrain Sorkin as a screenwriter, and he is far from the control of David Fincher. And this gap in ability has also become the gap between "The Trial of the Chicago Seven" and the real masterpiece.
"Seven Gentlemen" is good, but in the end it just stays "good-looking", it can't stand chewing and aftertaste, no matter how many skills, it's just to show off. With its favorable conditions, it should not have stopped here, but it did stagnate and eventually fell into paleness.
Editor | Xu Yuan
Typography | Turner
THE END
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