The Trial of the Chicago 7 Analysis

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Written and Directed by: Aaron Sorkin
Streaming on Netflix.

A courtroom drama is like the home ground of Aaron Sorkin, who is a master of writing punchy, witty, conflicting dialogue. I could appreciate Social Network, Molly's Game and Steve Jobs better than this film - because all the three of those films are about people playing the capitalism game in America, people making it big with money - that's something that could be appreciated without much understanding of the context. This film is about a trial against seven people for inciting riots at a protest, where they say that the police got violent first. I had to pause the film, and read about why they were protesting and come back to watch it. Then  when I figured that it's a protest against the U. S. government for participating in the Vietnam war, the ending scene made sense to me. Abbie Hoffman, one of the defendants wrote a book called 'Steal This Book' - a book which exemplified the counter culture of the 60s.

The dramatic aspect which anyone can appreciate is the judge in this case being clearly biased - it's such oppression. Aaron Sorkin's intercutting is done in the film too, and it works very well - a lot of scenes are intercut between three scenes - and they work very well because of his effective use of dialogue. Usually he intercuts, with voice overs but this film doesn't use a lot of voice overs. They instead use one of the defendants narrating some parts of the incident to some people and use it as some sort of a voice over. There is a lot of Sorkin-ish dialogue here - for example, 'what's the other word for trapped' 'that's a contradictory instruction' - in Aaron Sorkin's world, he presents some characters to be a little more witty, he makes them observe and talk about things which we usually don't. Is it a good thing that he does this with a lot of his characters? I don't know - but it surely makes for interesting drama.