04/20/2011
Review by David Anthony
Robert Redford’s The Conspirator is a thoughtful and timely film. Based on a true historical incident implicating Mary Surratt, owner of the inn where John Wilkes Booth and other plotters, including Surratt’s son, John, conspired to avenge the lost Confederate cause in early 1865 by exacting vengeance against President Abraham Lincoln, The Conspiratortakes great pains to achieve factual verisimilitude.Robin Wright is Mrs. Surratt. James McAvoy is her reluctant attorney, a Union War hero, Frederick Aiken, pressed into service by Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), Attorney General in the Zachary Taylor administration and convinced that a fair trial for this defendant, hauled before a bloody-minded military tribunal, is impossible.
The film immediately draws disturbing parallels to the present, starting with the palpable tension following on the heinous assassination of a beloved President at a climactic moment, the triumphal end of the horrific Civil War. Secretary of State Edwin M. Stanton, played unsparingly by Kevin Kline, is in no mood to consider such legal niceties as habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence, or the right of the accused to a civil trial by a jury of peers. Nor will her gender count in Surratt’s favor, in spite of the risk of setting a precedent by subjecting a woman to a possible death sentence. The decision to arrest, indict and try Mary Surratt for a capital crime before a Military Court will remind viewers of the tragic aftermath of 9/11, as it should.
Wright and McAvoy capture the spirit of their respective sides, each embodying the challenge of finding some common ground as the nation strives to reconcile its grief. The evidence implicating Surratt is circumstantial and Aiken does everything in his power to demonstrate that the State had not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Aiken’s stirring summation, grounded in principle, is powerfully delivered.
Robin Wright carries Mary Surratt through this depiction with profound power. An unrepentant daughter of the South and irrepressible foe of the Union, she reveals knowledge of an earlier stage of the connivance of the cabal concerning kidnapping Lincoln, but expresses distress about the final outcome of the conspirators’ actions.
The Conspirator is something of an emotional roller coaster, tugging to and fro at the viewer’s heartstrings. It raises serious questions of conscience and of law, and takes us into a place and time surprisingly familiar, even though a century and a half divide us from it. Director Robert Redford has chosen a contemplative vehicle, built upon a story by Gregory Bernstein and James D. Solomon, with a screenplay by Solomon. The Conspirator is not in any sense light, but it is surely necessary viewing.
For the KUSP Film Gang, this is David Anthony.