Catching up on 2011 - Henry Saw: The Conspirator

So this was a real stinker


The story of the Lincoln assassination, and the subsequent manhunt and trial that proceeded it, is one of the more intricate and fascinating stories in American history. Unfortunately, The Conspirator is just about the lamest and flattest telling of the tale you can imagine. Every aspect of this film, ranging from the script, to the production design, to the acting is woefully sub-par. There are numerous sequences in The Conspirator that barely rise above the level of the recreation scenes one might see sprinkled throughout a History Channel special. The fact that Robert Redford directed this movie, and it features numerous actors whose work I like and respect, makes the film just that more disappointing.

"In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, seven men and one woman are arrested and charged with conspiring to kill the President, the Vice-President, and the Secretary of State. The lone woman charged, Mary Surratt, 42, owns a boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and others met and planned the simultaneous attacks. Against the ominous back-drop of post-Civil War Washington, newly-minted lawyer, Frederick Aiken, a 28-year-old Union war-hero, reluctantly agrees to defend Surratt before a military tribunal. As the trial unfolds, Aiken realizes his client may be innocent and that she is being used as bait and hostage in order to capture the only conspirator to have escaped a massive manhunt, her own son." (Via IMDB)



If this was just a boring and spiritless movie that would be one thing. There have been a lot of dry period pieces before, and will be plenty more in the future, but The Conspirator is actually just kind of pathetic. To take such an interesting and pivotal episdoe in American history, and produce this...it almost boggles the mind. Redford fails to stage any interesting sequences, even the recreation of the three fold assassination attempts on Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward falls completely flat. The rest of the movie just exists as an opportunity for Redford to reveal his views about the abuse of power by the government and draw lame parallels to current political hot buttons (even in this the film feels dated by a few years).

The cast, though theoretically impressive, are all wasted and all look out of place. Kevin Kline is comically bad as a maniacal version of Edwin Stanton, Tom Wilkinson is given nothing to work with and just sort of sleep walks through his scenes, and only god knows what Justin Long is doing in this movie. The two leads, Robin Wright Penn as Mary Surratt herself, and James McAvoy as her lawyer Frederick Aiken, do their best but also fall far short. Penn is just dull in her underwritten and one dimensional role while McAvoy seems to be trying to use all his acting tricks to save the movie but his performance ends up feeling off-kilter and unfocused.



I'm always down for a solid and dramatic period piece, and sometimes even a mediocre and melodramatic one, but The Conspirator can't even live up to that low standard. It's a flat out bad movie, and it's pedigree just makes it all the worse.

Grade: D

Best Scene: The early scene showing McAvoy attending a party near the end of the war.