Tag Archives: Evan Rachel Wood

You get a sense of the fevered feelings that must have gone into the making of Robert Redford’s latest directorial effort, “The Conspirator.” The story of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the only woman held as part of the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln in 1865, it’s fraught with implications of and similarities to our present-day situation: civilians tried in military courts, constitutional rights trampled in the pursuit of unity and national healing, murky and dangerous precedents established in the name of clear and present danger. But on-screen, some of the heat and passion behind the initial impetus seems to have curdled and cooled as the idea became an actual film.

From the first frame, “The Conspirator” looks like a bad idea, shot in a way that makes every scene look like it’s going to give you hay fever from the motes of dust hanging in every shaft of hazy light, with actors in period facial hair and costuming looking like they’re playing an especially expensive children’s game of dress-up. There was potential here for a film that recast half-remembered history in the new light of real facts — Lincoln’s assassination was not a lone killer assaulting one target but, rather, a coordinated assault on several high-ranking officials — but James D. Solomon’s script rushes past the interesting realities of the past, instead stretching and straining the story to be relevant to our present. (It’s as if “All the President’s Men” abandoned the dogged, shoe-leather detective work of Woodward and Bernstein — a source of both dramatic tension and interest — to instead feature characters declaiming how bad Nixon was.)
Certainly, the ideas raised by the Surratt case are relevant to our present circumstance; what’s damaging to the film is that everyone involved places so little trust in us to make those connections for ourselves. At one point, protagonist James McAvoy, a Union veteran reluctantly pressed into service as the lawyer defending Surratt, rails at bearded bad guy Secretary of War Stanton (Kevin Kline), saying, “Why did I fight for the Union if my rights are not assured?” Much like Redford’s last directorial effort, the noble but immobile “Lions for Lambs,” his latest film has a two-fold problem: Its (bleeding) heart is plainly on its sleeve, and its brain is nowhere to be found.

McAvoy and Wright are fine enough, but they’re ultimately fighting in vain against the fact that the script is so clearly on their side. The only possible question of dramatic tension is in just how painfully the filmmakers expect us to strain our necks from nodding in agreement with their values and positions right down the line. There’s a huge cast here — Tom Wilkinson, Alexis Bledel, Evan Rachel Wood, Danny Huston, Justin Long (who looks as out of place in 1865 as Abraham Lincoln would behind the counter at a 21st-century Del Taco) and many more — but they’re no more than puppets made to mouth platitudes, moved about the film with such black-and-white morality and restricted movement that we may as well be watching a chess match.

“The Conspirator” is suffused with such earnestness that, when it finishes, you half-expect to find yourself sitting at a desk in your senior-year civics class, with your teacher poised at the ready to guide you through a series of preapproved discussion points. There are occasional flashes of emotion, like when a testifying Wood is kept from even seeing her mother, Wright, by a phalanx of soldiers standing to obstruct her view. But these flashes of light and life are so few and far between that it’s hardly worth trudging through the heavy-handed moments. The cast and financiers were surely called to participate by the golden glow of Redford’s past glories, but that glow must have blinded them to the clanging clumsiness of the film’s script. Great moral stands don’t make for great drama; good intentions aren’t good art. “The Conspirator” wants to show us how the struggles of the past can guide us in the present, but it might have served that aim better if it first tried to give us an exciting story instead stumbling over itself in the need to tell an “important” one.

–From my review at MSN Movies