THE CONSPIRATOR

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Civil to Military
Robert Redford Takes Stock of America
By Cole Smithey

Robert Redford's first directorial effort since his 2007 anti-war polemic "Lions for Lambs," is a striking Civil War courtroom drama not far removed from a film like Bruce Beresford's "Breaker Morant." The assassination of President Lincoln calls into question the possible participation of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the mother of a young man who befriended John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices. It was inside the boarding house Mary Surratt owned and operated where Booth and his men planned the attacks on Lincoln. Hot for revenge, the state seeks the death penalty and tries the accused civilians in a Washington D.C. military tribunal rather than in a civil court. 

In "Breaker Morant," the British Empire holds a military trial for a troop of Australian soldiers in order to mask an end to their military occupation of South Africa. Here the powers that be take a similar tact of symbolic prosecution, albeit one made more odious by its substitution of a military trial for what should be a civil proceeding.

In yet another wonderfully designed portrayal in a career of memorable performances James McAvoy plays Frederick Aiken, a young Union war-hero-turned-attorney. Aiken is assigned on the day before the trial begins to defend Mary Surratt whose sought-after son John vanished two week's before the assassination. McAvoy's ice-water American accent divulges the precision of his character's ability to comprehend complexities of the case before him. He is genuinely heroic.

Clear connections between the United States Government's modern day attack on civil liberties and the Constitution are at the heart of the story. Kevin Kline's pernicious Secretary of War Edwin Stanton goes to any lengths to see his personal brand of political expediency exerted over Mary Surratt regardless of a dearth of evidence against her.

Newbie screenwriter James Solomon develops the touchy relationship between Aiken and Mary Surratt as a window inside Aiken's thorny process of setting aside his biases against a person who should be considered innocent until proven guilty. Aiken too is predisposed against Surratt as a guilty accomplice until he begins to comprehend the limited extent of her involvement in what was initially planned to be a kidnap attempt. It takes a while for him (and for us) to accept Mary Surratt as a real human being. Robin Wright soars to dramatic heights in her restrained performance. The effect is reminiscent of Jessica Lange's finest work. Between them, McAvoy and Wright carry the drama to its farthest recesses of innate social consciousness. Left to the wolves by her son, Mary Surratt is supported by Aiken's compassion.

"The Conspirator" misses the mark in several areas. A lack of narrative attention to the circumstances of the planning by Booth and his men, that went on in Mary Surratt's boarding house, nag at the story. The other accused are set up as props rather than as integral parts of the story. Some cast members hold their own better than others. Where Tom Wilkinson exquisitely carries the film's theme lines as attorney Reverdy Johnson, Justin Long is excruciatingly miscast in his supporting role as Nicholas Baker, a confidant of Aiken. The look of the film is clinically staged to a near-soap opera brand of visual wash.

Mary Surratt's mistreatment at the hands of the United States federal system remains a black eye on a legal process whose conditions remain as susceptible to influence today as they were in 1865. 

 Rated PG-13. 122 mins.

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Constructed on conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro's doomed expedition in search of El Dorado, Werner Herzog's landmark picture opens with a five-minute snaking descent of troops and slaves down an enormous fog-shrouded mountain in the Andes.

The year is 1560. A haunting musical score (by the German band Popol Vuh) connects the viewer to the group's ant-like movements through a dwarfing terrain that is at once familiar and alien. At the mountain's base runs the treacherous Amazon River.

Klaus Kinski, as soldier Lope de Aguirre, tells Pizarro (Alejandro Repulles), "No one can get down that river alive!" It's with these initial prophesying words that we are swept into a gravitational narrative spin of man against nature.

Herzog's camera lingers uncomfortably on the river's raging brown and white rapids that ooze like hot lava. His camera is part of the landscape. Chained slaves struggle to pull a heavy cannon through the knee-deep watery jungle. At a clearing in the forest the desperate Pizarro announces a change of plans that will send a smaller expedition of forty men to travel up river to obtain food and information about hostile Indians, as well as the specific location of the elusive El Dorado.

Don Pedro de Ursura (Ruy Guerra) leads the expedition with the contemptuous Aguirre as his second-in-command. It is only a matter of time before Kinski’s cunning Aguirre, who travels with his 15-year-old daughter (played by a blonde Peruvian actress who uncannily resembles Kinski’s own daughter Nastassja at that age), usurps power through a series of carefully placed suggestions, orders, and violent acts.

As Aguirre takes control, his descent into madness reflected in Kinski's crazed eyes and impatient lips. Nowhere else in cinema will you find such a methodically dangerous performance as the one Kinski gives here. “Aguirre, The Wrath of God” marked the first of five collaborations between Werner Herzog and his muse Klaus Kinski.

Francis Ford Coppola drew on "Aguirre" for inspiration for "Apocalypse Now" as a surreal vision of jungle-fueled insanity. Still, Herzog's film approaches the natural world in a more literal way than Coppola did, making it all the more disorienting, immediate, and poetic.

There is a lingering voodoo in the movie that never lets you forget the folly of man's puny sins against a dark universal order of which psychosis, sickness, and death are the inevitable symptoms.

Not Rated. 95 mins.

BLUEBEARD

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Catherine Breillat's transformation from feminist enfant terrible to formalist practitioner is a half-effort at a Peter Greenaway-styled cinematic approach, but without Greenaway's rigor.

The death of their patriarch leaves Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) and her sister Anne (Daphne Baiwir) kicked out of their 17th century nunnery before their mother's property is repossessed.

When the wealthy local ogre Lord Bluebeard sends a messenger requesting the girls' attendance at a party where he will choose a wife, Marie-Catherine is keen on going in spite of the Lord's infamous reputation as a serial killer of women.

Breillat flips between two young modern precocious sisters reading Bluebeard's well-worn cautionary story as if it were a Grimm Brothers fairy tale.

Marie-Catherine takes the bull — in this case Bluebeard himself — by the horns and defiantly marries the menacing brute as if to prove that she alone holds a secret to defeating his murderous scheme for her kind.

The trouble is that Bluebeard is the most interesting character on display, but apart from his curiosity about astronomy, we don't learn much about him or the history of his homicidal distrust of women.

Rather than expanding on the story of Bluebeard, Breillat has neutered it.

Not Rated. 80 mins.