“Lincoln Assassinated Again”
It’s amazing that such a towering historical figure like Abraham Lincoln has not yet had a decent movie made that’s about him. Steven Spielberg’s got one in the works for next year in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays Lincoln, so that strange missing link between Hollywood and history might finally have a resolution. There have been a few minor films about Lincoln nearly a century ago, and others in which President Lincoln is a supporting character in stories about The Civil War. But none that really ever focused on the man, his politics and his leadership of this nation through an extremely turbulant period.
Robert Redford’s new directorial effort “The Conspirator” is a story on the trial of the assassins. If that phrase sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s similar to the title of Jim Garrison’s book about the Kennedy assassination which happened almost exactly 100 years after Lincoln’s assassination.
After an uncomfortably rushed opening in which the actual assassination feels confused and awkward, the movie settles in to tell the story it wants to tell. About how civilian Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) was stripped of her constitutional rights of trial by jury and was convicted and executed mostly because her son was an acquaintance of John Wilkes Booth. It’s a story worth telling, but poor Abraham Lincoln seems to be missing, yet again, from a movie that should be more about him.
The actor who plays the Lincoln character in “The Conspirator” must be the luckiest Hollywood extra in history to land such a role as an extra. Lincoln has no lines of dialogue and his face is barely visible. He is indeed an extra in his own movie.
That should say a lot about how wrong the approach to this material actually is. And once you get past that, what you’re left with feels like a standard courtroom drama or legal procedural. Strong performances by great actors like Kevin Kline, Tom Wilkinson, James McAvoy and Evan Rachel Wood don’t do enough to pull us into their story and away from the story we’d rather be following. It left me a bit frustrated and feeling like “The Conspirator” was a real missed opportunity for greatness.
DVD Double Feature:
Historically 100 years apart, there are eerie similarities between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy. Booth never stood trial because he was killed. Oswald was murdered while in custody. Civil rights and race issues involving African Americans were important elements in the both presidencies. The Civil War and Vietnam made both men wartime presidents. And now two films tell the stories about the trials of suspected conspirators, Redford’s new “The Conspirator” and Oliver Stone’s 1991 masterpiece “JFK”. Stone’s film is a great example of how Redford’s should have been done because it deals quite a lot with Kennedy’s politics and offers eye-opening theories as to the how’s and why’s of his assassination. By contrast, Redford’s film starts out feeling like a sequel to a film that doesn’t yet exist. It begins with Lincoln being taken out, and Redford continues under the assumption that his audience already knows why. Maybe after Spielberg’s Lincoln film is released next year, “The Conspirator” will play better as a companion piece to that. I’d rather see part one of this story before seeing part two.
Historically 100 years apart, there are eerie similarities between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy. Booth never stood trial because he was killed. Oswald was murdered while in custody. Civil rights and race issues involving African Americans were important elements in the both presidencies. The Civil War and Vietnam made both men wartime presidents. And now two films tell the stories about the trials of suspected conspirators, Redford’s new “The Conspirator” and Oliver Stone’s 1991 masterpiece “JFK”. Stone’s film is a great example of how Redford’s should have been done because it deals quite a lot with Kennedy’s politics and offers eye-opening theories as to the how’s and why’s of his assassination. By contrast, Redford’s film starts out feeling like a sequel to a film that doesn’t yet exist. It begins with Lincoln being taken out, and Redford continues under the assumption that his audience already knows why. Maybe after Spielberg’s Lincoln film is released next year, “The Conspirator” will play better as a companion piece to that. I’d rather see part one of this story before seeing part two.
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