The Conspirator (2010)

Directed by: Robert Redford | 123 minutes | drama, crime, history | Actors: Robin Wright, James McAvoy, Evan Rachel Wood, Alexis Bledel, Justin Long, Danny Huston, Norman Reedus, Kevin Kline, Tom Wilkinson, Jonathan Groff, Stephen Root, Toby Kebbell, Johnny Simmons, Shea Whigham, James Badge Dale, Colm Meaney, Chris Bauer, Jim True-Frost, Lori Beth Edgeman, Gerald Bestrom, John Michael Weatherly, Brian F. Durkin, Richard L. Fister, Marcus Hester, Amy Tipton, Brandon Carroll, Jeremy Tuttle, Ron Stafford

Four US presidents were once murdered ‘in the saddle’. The attacks on Garfield (1881) and McKinley (1901) are almost forgotten, the one on Kennedy (1963) still appeals to the imagination. Robert Redford’s ‘The Conspirator’ is set in 1865, when the government buildings in Washington DC are still surrounded by wide, green expanses. The story opens with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In a theater, by an actor: John Wilkes Booth (Toby Kebbell). “The South is avenged!” Booth yells to the horrified audience. It will be the last time he is on stage.

After the murder, the focus shifts to the next trial. In the dock: widow Mary Surratt (Robin Wright). As a boarding house keeper, she is suspected of harboring the conspiracy that led to the murder of ‘Abe’ Lincoln, so beloved in the North. Her guilt is pre-determined. It is only with difficulty that one finds someone willing to take on the defense of Surratt: Yankee Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy). As an ex-army officer, he comes straight from the civil war between North and South, which is nearing its end in 1865. As a starting lawyer, Aiken wants “nothing more” than to leave the war behind. The biggest hurdle is his world view – on a battlefield you have no use for nuance, in the courtroom nothing for black-and-white thinking. McAvoy’s boyish demeanor makes it difficult to see in Aiken someone who has often looked death in the eye. It makes sense that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (an almost unrecognizable Kevin Kline) calls him ‘boy’. It is part of Stanton’s response when Aiken indignantly confronts him about the unfair legal process his client is facing. “The people just want someone to be found guilty,” Stanton said.

The historical events in ‘The Conspirator’ are faithfully reconstructed, in faded, contrasting colors. The images seem to come from far away, as if the lens had been smeared with petroleum jelly. At the same time, current events resound in ‘The Conspirator’. Mary Surratt is being tried under the laws of war, by a military tribunal made up of Union officers. While Surratt is a citizen and her case, Aiken argues in vain, should be adjudicated by an (impartial) civil judge. Something similar is currently playing at a location called Guantanamo Bay. However, it is questionable whether such a legal issue adds much to this film as a film. In any case, it is not very visual and that unfortunately applies to more elements in ‘The Conspirator’. The conversations between Aiken and his mentor, attorney Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) revolve around the importance of due process or the meaning of reasonable doubt. Philosophically interesting, but their altercations don’t come across as an equivalent verbal duel between opinions. Just as Surratt is guilty in advance, it is as if the moral winner has already been determined in advance. As faithful as ‘The Conspirator’ seems to want to be to the facts, the storytelling is used so sparingly here to make a haunting representation of it. Perhaps it is to compensate for this that the film has such an emphatic eye for details. The shivering conspirator who drinks courage into himself and just barely says ‘brrr…’ out of nervousness. The confused heads of the suspects in the courtroom as the burlap sack is removed from their heads. The spectator hissing like a snake. The warden, emphatically shaking his head, when he sees that Surratt has not touched her food. Amid these figures, Mary Surrat, featured as Vermeer’s Milkmaid, is dignified and untouchable. Like a statue.