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The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)
The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)

Pop CultureOctober 17, 2020

Review: Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is Aaron Sorkin at his best

The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)
The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)

Our most verbose screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, makes good on all his hype in just his second turn as director.

If I had to pick one of the best opening scenes of the past decade, I’d go with the scene that opens The Social Network. It’s an immediate evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg – and by proxy, every socially awkward man with more brains than charisma – by a fictional ex-girlfriend, one with no patience for him. It nearly renders the rest of the film unnecessary: we know everything we need to know about Zuckerberg, and why he made the cyberplague that is Facebook, from that one scene. And it’s all due to Sorkin’s incredible dialogue.

Sorkin is, give or take a pre-cancelled Woody Allen, the most audibly recognisable writer of his generation. From the very first line of dialogue, you know you’re listening to a Sorkin script, for better or worse. His characters volley lines of dialogue like they’re in the final match at Wimbledon, charged with enviable energy. Or at least it is when he’s on his game (see: The Social Network, Steve Jobs, most of the West Wing). When he’s not, his writing can be unbearably pompous, moving seemingly randomly along the spectrum of idealism versus cynicism and frankly, really goddamned boring (Studio 60, The Newsroom, The Newsroom again, just for posterity). 

However, even when he’s at his best, there’s one constant with Sorkin: he has the belief that a brilliant man (and it almost always is a man with him) can change the world with the strength of their words, their ideas, and their sheer will. This works when applied to men like Steve Jobs and, at a stretch, Mark Zuckerberg, but when put into the mouths of journalists and comedy writers, it can get tiresome. It’s why a project like The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a perfect fit for the guy. 

A group of protestors approaches cops in Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Photo: Netflix)

It’s a courtroom drama that focuses on the real-life, absolutely cooked trial of seven men in Chicago charged by the government with conspiracy and inciting riots. It’s an absolute rort, a way for the conservative government to shut down the leaders of countercultural protests around the Vietnam War and 1968 Democratic National Convention.

I’ll get this out of the way now: it’s good Sorkin, even great Sorkin. A courtroom drama, revolving around activism, is the perfect canvas for the writer to paint the big ideas and thoughts of men with broad strokes, and the dialogue here absolutely crackles, with a stacked ensemble of actors (including Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mark Rylance, Sacha Baron Cohen and a perpetually sitting Frank Langella) who devour their lines like free food at a fancy party. It’s such a huge cast that the actors only really get the chance to make vivid impressions rather than develop full characters, but it chugs along magnificently. Baron Cohen, in a rare dramatic turn (or a dramatic-with-punchlines turn) is especially strong here: he nails the weird charisma of an activist who can make people follow him, without ever understanding why. He also nails a manicure-on-a-chalkboard hybrid accent, a tall ask for any actor.

Mark Rylance, Michael Keaton and Ben Shenkmen in Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Photo: Netflix)

The best thing about the film, though, is how disarmingly relevant it is. Late in the piece, when the remaining members of the Seven are being prepared for the trial, it’s Hoffman who says, “It’s a revolution, you have to hurt somebody’s feelings.” The film, subtly but effectively, gets across the idea civility can often end up just being a pleasant cover for compliance, and even evil. From within the confines of the courtroom, we’re shown the vastly different costs of calm civility and rebellion: Redmayne’s Tom Hayden stands up in court to show respect to the judge because it’s “the right thing to do” while Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Bobby Seale, a black man roped into the trial for reasons unclear and corrupt, is literally bound and gagged for defending his constitutional rights. While civility can be cheap in the short term, it’ll cost you in the long run. Rebellion? It stings, but if you do it right, then you save others their pain. It’s a surprising political swerve for the writer, who has often been found stuffing progressive thoughts into the mouths of conservative men, winking at the audience as he does so, and it’s a welcome one, given the current climate of, well, fucking everything.

As with every Sorkin project, his best moments can be marred by his worst impulses. In this film, he mars the best scene – a harrowing crosscut between a late night trial prep session and a protest being violently shut down outside a Chicago restaurant – with a clunker of a line: “Am I the only one who sees what’s going on out there?” Sorkin is one of the most ostentatiously gifted writers of his generation, and he always wants to make sure that we get every point he’s making, every second of the time. 

It’s this impulse that makes his work energetic, but occasionally exhausting and less occasionally on-the-nose. But when the stuff is this good, you can understand why he does it. The most chilling moment in the film, bar none, is towards the end, when Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella, embodying smug patriarchy brilliantly) commends the very civil, polite Tom Hayden for being the only one of the Seven not to be bordering on being in contempt of court. He says, “I truly believe that one day you will be a very productive part of the system.” It’s one of those first-scene-in-Social-Network moments: it sums up a film in one moment, like only Sorkin can.

You can watch The Trial of Chicago 7 on Netflix now.

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Nick Johnston of Cut Off Your Hands
Nick Johnston of Cut Off Your Hands

Pop CultureOctober 16, 2020

Cutting it out: Cut Off Your Hands on calling it quits

Nick Johnston of Cut Off Your Hands
Nick Johnston of Cut Off Your Hands

After almost 15 years together, Cut Off Your Hands are officially disbanding. Frontman Nick Johnston spoke to The Spinoff about where he’s been and where he’s going. 

Three years into their decade-and-a-half-long career, Cut Off Your Hands needed a break. The Auckland band were high-energy, sweaty, and perpetual; frontman and singer Nick Johnston reckons they probably played 200 shows a year in those early days. “We were so intensely aspirational, and wanted to do this forever, but just burnt out,” he says.

The band’s drummer, Brent Harris, dipped out of that tour early due to hearing loss. After it ended, Johnston took two years away from the tunes to rebuild his mental health. “I couldn’t even listen to music without having some kind of panic attack. I just didn’t know what was going on.”

Hollow, their follow-up to 2008’s You & I, was finally released in 2011. It took three years to get off the ground, and by the time they started touring the album Johnston had begun to study architecture – a field he now works in full time. His much younger classmates gave him a ribbing when they saw the posters, not realising they were at school with an international rock star.

COYH played to crowds at Sammy’s in Dunedin, San Fran in Wellington, SXSW in Texas, at festivals like Big Day Out and City Limits; they recorded at Edwyn Collins’ studio and opened for Foals; they broke bones and went back to school and thought about starting families.

All this happened on the back of only two albums. Now there are three. Their new album, Higher Lows and Lower Highs (stylised as HLLH) is out today. Its eponymous single came out three years ago.

“We started [HLLH] in 2014,” says Johnston. “Since then Brent has had two kids, I’ve moved to Melbourne and back, Phil [Hadfield] has gotten married, Mikey [Ramirez] had two kids.”

The album’s first single, ‘Hate Somebody’, was released in 2016. “A year later we were like, oh, should we do the next one?”

The staggered release of HLLH’s singles has given it a sense of timelessness. There are songs new to us, like the recently released and very lovely ‘Blue Smoke Draft’, and then songs that feel like classics, like ‘Hate Somebody’ and ‘On the Sea‘. The album and its singles are still something you can flail to in a mosh, but lean more into new wave than hard rock. “It’s a bit slower,” said Johnston. “It’s easier to play as a 35-year-old.”

While You & I was inspired by The Smiths and The Beach Boys, HLLH is a tribute to Talking Heads and Television. “It’s an ode to so much of the stuff we love, and we don’t really care if it wears its influence on its sleeve,” says Johnston.

The music video for ‘Live for Each Other’ was released this morning, and its bass riff and backing vocals stay true to David Byrne and Tina Weymouth’s vision; Johnston says the song’s structure was built around a ‘Slippery People’ sample.

He’s not tired of the music this time. That’s not why the band’s calling it quits; they just want the chance to find out who they are away from it. “I want to do my own stuff,” says Johnston. His solo project – currently named Nicky By Nature – is inspired more by Frank Ocean than Phil Spector. “Its not like having the band stopped me from [going solo], but I have a finite amount of energy now that my work’s pretty serious. It’s the same with everyone else.”

“I’ve used this analogy so much, but it’s like if you had your ex with you every time you met someone new, or a childhood friend. You couldn’t be a new person.”

While Johnston’s passion for the craft isn’t fading, a project like COYH – which has existed for almost half his life – can consume your identity. “For me it needs to be a nice, clean line.”

“I can’t get out of the way I write for COYH unless I do it differently.”

There are only two chances left to see the band: one at San Fran, and one again at Whammy. “It gets really hectic,” says Johnston of the Whammy crowds. “We have different crowds in Auckland than we have anywhere else.” At their show last Friday, nothing had changed. “I always feel like Aucklanders know us, and pull little things to try and detract from us, or they’re bogans who are real buzzy. And there’s our friends.”

“I had dudes screaming love songs I wrote when I was 20 back at me. There was crowd surfing.” He seems surprised by how hard people frothed COYH at the show, as though the “new” tracks aren’t something we’ve already been blasting for years.

The first time I saw COYH was in Dunedin, far from the friends and lovers and strangers that scream bloody joy at their packed-out Auckland shows. No one knew their names, just that ‘You Should Do Better’ slapped. It still slaps.

COYH will play Auckland’s Whammy Bar on October 29 and Wellington’s San Fran on October 30.

This content, like Cut Off Your Hands’ album HLLH, was produced with the support of NZ on Air.

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