49059804
Never has the unpopular lawyer bit been less involving than it is in “The Conspirator,” a courtroom drama that’s going to net a lot of good ink simply because it’s a period piece directed by Robert Redford. But if we’re being honest, Redford has never been all that stellar of a filmmaker, despite the grand receptions of professional peaks like “Quiz Show” and “Ordinary People.”
In his latest, an unearthing of little-known facts about Lincoln-assassination co-conspirator Mary Surratt, he fails to wrangle or subdue a highly problematic script, which squanders priceless historic material and belabors the values of “truth, justice and the American way” with the grating pretense of Sarah Palin.
The first feature to be made by the American Film Co., a pet project of Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts that’s bent on the production of patriotic epics, “The Conspirator” strives to be a provocative indictment of governmental wrongdoing, but winds up the kind of preachy, banal fluff that legions of junior high students dread. An early trial scene with a U.S. senator (Tom Wilkinson) who mentors Surratt’s reluctant defense attorney, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), is bursting with a chorus of trite hymns to Uncle Sam, and what follows is a listless, toothless retread of the travails of Atticus Finch, where the unfairly accused, instead of being black, merely wears it. (Call it, “To Kill a Dodo Bird.”)
The film is not without fine acting (Robin Wright is excellent as the stalwart, if motivationally inconsistent, Surratt), but the casting is wildly hit-and-miss, from the appropriate (Kevin Kline as Lincoln’s war secretary) to the obvious (Danny Huston as a despicable prosecutor) to the insane (Justin Long as a piano-playing Civil War vet). Screenwriter James Solomon swings and misses in his attempt to score any authentic relationships among these characters, and the same goes for his aims at urgency and fascination.
Solomon toiled away at his script for a whopping 18 years, which makes the final verdict on “The Conspirator” all the more painful: This baby needed a lot more conspiring.
The Conspirator
PG-13
One-a-half-reels out of four
Opens tomorrow in area theaters
Recommended Rental
Rabbit Hole
PG-13
Available Tuesday
Nicole Kidman earned a deserving Oscar nod for her poignant work as a grieving mother in this emotionally frank and dramatically scalding adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Co-starring Aaron Eckhart and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, “Rabbit Hole” blends humor with heartbreak as it presents a couple who must learn to live together again if they are to get past their son’s death. SPR
49059809
49059799
