Movie Review: The Conspirator

This weekend marks a hardly known Federal holiday that commemorates the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. As a lover of history and of this particular President, I was anticipating the telling of a little known story that took place after the assassination of the President. The Conspirator is both an historic telling of Mary Surratt, the owner of the boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices lived while planning the death of President Lincoln, and her alleged involvement in the plot.

This reviewer, like most, has a favorite movie genre and The Conspirator fits neatly into two of my favorites: drama and historical. Sadly, this movie took an opportunity to tell a rarely known story and place it in context with a truthful recounting and shine a spotlight on how the failure of the justice system of the day failed to work and that this trial changed the way the entire legal system works to this day and squandered it as well as the responsibility to tell a compelling story and entertain an audience; none of which seems to have been a consideration for director Robert Redford and writer James Solomon.

Although the look and feel of the movie is right on, any consideration to telling a good story starts and ends there. If this had been a silent film, the audience would have been better off but The Conspirator leaves you wanting good acting, great dialogue, and some drama or sense of excitement, but there is none, and I mean none.

Historical movies have enjoyed great success through the years and more recent films like Titanic, The Passion of the Christ, Gladiator, 300, to name just a few, have been relatively well told and competently acted slices of history that provide great entertainment and even some suspense despite the outcome being a foregone conclusion. Exactly why The Conspirator never seems to find any traction dumbfounds me.

Robin Wright’s portrayal of Mary Surratt is uninspired and beyond looking really tired gives the audience nothing to hold onto or care about. James McAvoy plays the court appointed attorney Frederick Aiken who is forced against his patriotic sense of pride to defend her and ensure that she receives a fair trial, something which is made clear early on in the film will never happen. This is where the drama should reside but it never materializes. McAvoy’s character lacks depth and provides no emotion or dimension to a figure that history tells us was a passionate and forceful lawyer. His distaste for this trial as an American is also what helped to focus him as a lawyer and if the actor had made an effort to show some struggle beyond a badly done scene between Aiken and Senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) maybe the audience would have felt some tension but we are left instead with a whiner who just goes along with the events unfolding around him because he doesn’t have a choice.

We can blame much of the lack of quality dialogue as the problem with the majority of this film, and uninspired direction by Redford just further irritates. The Conspirator never draws us in, nor does it ever ask us to invest anything emotionally in the film and ultimately ends with no drama, no tension, and no relief, save for the film itself mercifully ending. I cannot remember the last time I watched a movie where not a single performance was worthy of some type of praise. There is not a single scene in the film that moved me or held my attention and the natural progression of the story line felt like filler and not a timeline of any importance. Flashback scenes feel like an afterthought instead of necessary threads to help us understand and appreciate where the story is going. No effort is made to pull us in to the audacity of the judicial system which convicted the entire group of accomplices long before the trial began.

There is nothing to give away here and nothing that spoils the plot or the outcome. I realize most people have never heard of Mary Surratt and fewer still know of this trial. If properly told, acted, and directed that would have changed, but The Conspirator won’t do that and Mary Surratt will remain as anonymous as Molly Smith. Who is Molly Smith? That is precisely my point.