The Conspirator opens on a battlefield, corpse-strewn yet oddly spotless, where a wounded soldier tells a joke to another to keep his mind from fading. They’re rescued and the joke is cut short and there you have Robert Redford’s cinema, antiseptic mud and missing punchlines. Shameful history repeating itself is the issue: Constitutional rights trampled in the fallout of national tragedy, the Lincoln assassination as a 19th-century 9/11, the judicial farce of a glum Dixie widow thrown to Yankee military tribunals to appease a nation’s vengeful mood. The sacrificial lamb is one Mary Surratt (Robin Wright, asked to channel Liv Ullman), Confederate landlady, mother of a John Wilkes Booth cohort, and all-around totem of Southern obstinacy, defended in court by a wispy audience surrogate (James McAvoy) who’s meant to be shocked, shocked!, to learn that “in times of war, the law falls silent.” A courtroom mystery, but...
- 5/4/2011
- MUBI
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