(2010. dir: Robert Redford) In this massive waste of a colossal amount of talent, the fatally ambivalent clusterfuck that was Robert Redford's the Conspirator, Reedus trumps everyone in his uncompromisingly hard portrayal -- really, just a glorified cameo, with only a few minutes' screen-time, -- of Lewis Payne. Payne, or Powell, as was his given name, stands out in the annals of the assassins as the hardest and strongest of them, a sort of embodiment of Confederate malevolence. His attack on the aging, already wounded and prone Secretary of State William Seward was of such brutality that it's difficult to read its description without flinching. To see it onscreen is to understand it better: once committed to the act and within the house, Powell's pistol misfires, so he must resort to blunt force and the knife's edge, his ferocity fueled by adrenaline. And still it's impossible to watch without cringing.
Lewis Powell (he was tried under the name Payne, which he chose as an alias when forced to sign an Oath of Allegiance to the Union. I used to hope it was a sort of punk-rock choice, but really it was the surname of a family he'd befriended during his time riding with Mosby's Rangers) is perhaps, in retrospect, the most interesting of the conspirators. While Boothe's motivations, although his politics were genuinely heartfelt, were puffed out of proportion with vanity and dreams of self-aggrandizement, Powell was a soldier of no small courage and excellence, a gentleman known for his gallantry to women (except for the time he was pulled up before the Law for battering a black housemaid), and the son of a Baptist preacher with some intention, before he found his true calling with the Troubles, of taking up the cloth himself. Enlisted as a spy for the Confederacy late in the War, he met Boothe and the others through Mary Surratt's son John, and the rest is history. Up to the end, even from the gallows itself, he swore with some passion that Mary Surratt was not guilty, possibly because it was his own bad timing, arriving in disguise at her doorstep just as Union officers were swarming about the place, which probably sealed her doom.
If you watch no other part of the movie, and there's a good argument to be made that you should just check out a few books from the local library on the subject instead, watch the hanging scene. Inaccurate in detail as it is (think that crowd was silent and somber like that? not a chance. Think all four died instantly like that? the thick-necked Powell struggled for above five minutes before death finally came), the way Reedus' version of Powell faces his doom feels shockingly real and completely original, with no hint of cliche or play-acting.
Rating: two stars, for bits of accidental greatness amongst the shambles
Reedus Factor: four stars. With this performance, he officially becomes a national treasure
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