the conspirator: mothballs

*SPOILERS, but nothing you won't find in a history book*

I leaned over to my boyfriend after seeing the preview for this and like a smartass said, "I guess the sun was so young then it hadn't learned how to shine properly." I'd always assumed the photographs back then were dim and mud-colored due to caveman camera technology, but director Robert Redford & Co would have us believe (or perhaps don't trust us to otherwise suspend our disbelief) that things looked that way in real life. This is my boyfriend's two cents: he says they filmed The Conspirator to look as it would have looked had there been movie cameras at the time of Lincoln's assassination. Whether it was a good idea or not, he says, they pulled it off swimmingly.

Alright; he's the expert. For the record, it was not a good idea. Instead of experiencing the world with the color and immediacy with which folk of the day would have experienced it, we are forced to walk through a museum piece, all dust and sepia tones, which acts as a sort of Brechtian distancing device to keep us from immersing ourselves too deeply into the story.

Fat chance of that, pal. What WAS a good idea was to tell the story of Mary Surratt. It's still a good idea, and someday, someone will tell it. This, on the other hand, is a message with the trappings of a movie stuffed around it to create a two-hour padding. The message is simple: even in wartime, even under the direst and most emotional of circumstances, everyone, even the guilty, deserves the dignity of a fair trial. Good, timely message. Redford feels passionately about it. My time would have been better spent if he'd gone on TV and said it once, then sent me a good book on Mary Surratt from which I could actually learn something.

After a short preamble to show us what a noble and effective soldier our hero was during the War, we plunge right into the evening of the assassination, seeing it from many viewpoints, many threads pulling together into the single tragedy. Even Americans don't always know the whole of it: that as well as Booth there were assassins dispersed simultaneously to kill both the Vice President and the Secretary of State in attempt to unravel the entire fabric of the government. The fellow assigned to the VP lost heart, skedaddled and got drunk. Lewis Powell, on the other hand, made an attack so vicious on William Seward that it was a wonder he survived. It's a fascinating story. There's a book called Manhunt that you won't be able to put down, it's so compelling. It begins in the same place as this movie, on the fateful evening, and follows up through Booth's run through the hinterlands and final showdown in the Garrett barn. I mention it in case you decide to watch this, because afterwards you'll have a million questions about what really happened. You come away from this movie feeling like you're only getting a few glimpses of the real story, that things crucial to your understanding are being obscured from you, perhaps deliberately. A film director is like a dictator, hopefully a benevolent one; when we step into the darkened cinema we are entering into a covenant with him, trusting that he will reveal everything we need to know so that the film will make sense as a full experience, even if that experience is only for entertainment purposes. When there's a message he wants delivered, as there is here, that covenant's importance is heightened: he is trying to change the way we think, and so has an obligation to lay the facts out plainly so that we can make up our minds. On this count, the tyrant Redford lets us down.

Poor Robin Wright as the beleaguered Mary gives us not a person but a plaster saint, pulling her face into a beatific, slightly pained mask, as if she hadn't so much created her character as purloined her from looking at paintings of the Virgin Mary and various martyred and anorexic saint-girls throughout the ages. Contrast this Mary Surratt with her speechless but fully alive counterpart in John Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island. That movie is about Dr. Mudd, but even in just glimpses we see a fuller woman than we ever do in Redford's bloodless, lifeless and stubborn-jawed soapbox harangue. I don't blame Wright; I blame Redford. Going in open-minded, one emerges with the uncomfortable notion that Surratt was guilty as charged but that Redford is not comfortable saying so, that he doesn't trust us to swallow his medicine unless he sugar-coats it with a suspicion of innocence and maternal saintliness. In the end, although her guilt is not important to his message, it certainly is to us, his frustrated audience. The long time he spends on the execution is wasted time, except insofar as the period details might be educational. Involving us emotionally in these deaths would depend on our giving a crap about the defendants, which in turn would depend on our having got to know them in some way, and we don't, not at all, not even Surratt. The bits of humanity we see of her are sphinxlike and inconclusive, and until we have made up our minds (which we never do, finally, until we go home from the cinema and crack open some books) about her actions and, more importantly, her intentions concerning the assassination attempt, we will not commit our emotions one way or the other.

It's an all-around ill-considered venture, filled to busting with great actors in supporting and cameo roles, and therefore redolent of great expectations sadly unfulfilled. The dinner-table conversation between Kevin Kline as the Secretary of War and Tom Wilkinson as the southern Senator Johnson, the only man who recognizes the dangers of sacrificing Surratt's civil rights to placate the ravening crowd, made me long for an altogether different film. Stephen Root delivers another knock-out in a long series of small roles made great through sheer mastery of his art, and Norman Reedus in a tiny role as the loathesome Lewis Powell is single-handedly worth the price of admission.

I'm a James McAvoy fan ever since watching the double-punch of his Dan Foster in the original, magnificent State of Play and his Joe Macbeth in the dazzling Macbeth portion of the appallingly ill-conceived series Shakespeare Re-told (it's not the stories which make those plays great. He stole those from all over. It was the writer's extraordinary insight into human psychology, as well as a certain facility he had with words). In the Conspirator, this badly-edited, badly-timed hodgepodge, McAvoy is the young lawyer roped into a terrible gig and wanders, lost but well-intentioned, reiterating his bewilderment as people ask him again and again why he's taken on this lose/lose case which will destroy his career and reputation regardless of outcome. The scriptwriter can't seem to think of anything else to talk about, and it makes for extraordinarily dull playing. My greatest moment of delight is in fact at the end, when we're told that this seemingly ill-fated, sad-sack character went on to become an early editor of the Washington Post, no doubt wreaking a great deal of havoc-like vengeance on the system which had so betrayed him in his idealistic youth.