The problem with The Trial of the Chicago 7 begins with the title. The eponym of the court case that charged several antiwar activists with causing a riot during the 1968 Democratic convention implies seven coequal protagonists, an obvious impediment to the tidy storytelling expected of a 130 minute movie. By necessity, such an adaptation will leave a lot on the cutting room floor. If the viewer accepts this artistic license, however, they must still reckon with what writer/director Aaron Sorkin added and what he omitted, and why. Overwhelmingly, his narrative decisions were made to tamp down partisan conflict, and to declaw a group of people whose radicalism would both offend and shame the film’s target audience of modern liberals. 

Many wings of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s, especially the Yippie strand led by Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman, forwarded an explicit goal of “heightening the contradictions” between activists and the violent repression exacted against them by the government. At every conceivable turn of The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin does the opposite, jumping through hoops to reduce the distance between radicals like Hoffman and the prosecutors who sought to put him in prison for a decade. It appears Sorkin’s main objective was to make all the defendants acceptable to viewers whose ideal mode of activism is a BLM mural sponsored by Shell Oil. 

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the larger Sorkin-verse and its smothering brand of centrism (or to anyone who knows Sorkin took on the job of chronicling the Chicago Seven before he’d even heard of them). There is, however, an important distinction between forwarding a worldview through the vehicle of fictional characters and forwarding that worldview through history. If one could argue the bipartisan utopia of Sorkin’s presidential drama The West Wing rendered liberals completely unprepared for the blunt savagery of the GOP in the twenty-first century, the inciting media was still a fantasy, one that proclaimed This is how politics should be. Whereas The Trial of the Chicago 7 purports to tell us how politics were, and are. This is why a corrective is desperately needed.