The Conspirator

Watching Redford’s stunning and yet hauntingly-threadbare visuals, I couldn’t help but think that this must be what it would be like if Samuel Beckett directed an episode of Law and Order that took place in 1865. The poignance of The Conspirator unfortunately gets lost in the film’s sermonizing, and of course the accents in which those sermons are delivered certainly don’t help…

The film recounts the events following Lincoln’s assassination on April 14^th, 1865, and the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright – formerly ‘Penn’), the mother of the only conspirator to escape capture, and the proprietress of the boarding house where the men met. Focusing around Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) a young Union war hero and lawyer who is persuaded by his mentor, the Senator and former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to defend Surratt against the kangaroo court her military trial is fast becoming.

Remember the movie To Kill A Mockingbird? Of course you do, but do you remember where the movie (and novel) took place? The answer, if you didn’t know, is Alabama. Now, if you remember To Kill A Mockingbird, then you remember Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch, the one Southerner with a moral compass. Do you remember Peck’s Atticus needing to deliver his lines in some put-on Southern patois? No, because he didn’t . Now I’ve nothing against theatric accents (cf. that other moral Alabaman played by Mr. Tom Hanks), but this film just delivered it a little too thick. Throwing out the fact that McAvoy is a Scot (his accent is actually fine in that Hugh-Laurie-as-House sort of way), it felt like just about everyone apart from Kevin Kline’s Edwin Stanton was ‘doing’ an accent not their own. While Wright’s drawl was a bit melodramatic (it seemed like she wanted so bad to be Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind), Wilkinson’s (being a Brit trying to do is best ‘Southern patrician’) is downright ludicrous, though neither are as bad as Alexis Bledel’s whatever-the-hell-accent-she’s-trying-to-do whine, which almost makes the viewer hope that Aiken ultimately gets with Surratt’s daughter Anna (Evan Rachel Wood)  instead, as her accent is the only passable one of the bunch…  

The other major hindrance to this film is its obvious agenda, which is on parade throughout. Now I’ve got nothing against political messages within a film, and I’m as much a fan of habeas corpus as the next guy, but when what you’re showing almost makes the viewer glad that Booth pulled the trigger, well, you might have oversold it.   

In the end, it’s one of those films that isn’t going to leave a warm fuzzy feeling, but unsettling though it is, it has its merits. This is not a film for everyone – don’t watch it if you merely need something stupid to veg out in front of, and don’t expect any lovin’ afterwards if you take a date to see it (unless your partner’s turn-ons include injustice and autoerotic asphyxiation in which case, I envy you). BUT if you want to see a movie about what happened after Lincoln got shot, The Conspirator won’t disappoint…