BEFORE: OK, enough Colin Firth, and enough Oscar Wilde. (I tried, I really did.) This time it's Tom Wilkinson's turn to carry over from "The Importance of Being Earnest", and I've set the Wayback machine for another 30 years (or so) back, to 1865. I guess I could have watched this in February for President's Day/Lincoln's birthday, but I'm always into the romance films that month. I may not have even had a copy of this film then, so it goes here.
THE PLOT: Mary Surratt is the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. As the whole nation turns against her, she is forced to rely on her reluctant lawyer to uncover the truth and save her life.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Lincoln" (Movie #1,572)
AFTER: Ah, this would have gone nicely on a DVD with that film with Daniel Day-Lewis as Honest Abe - but no, I had to pair that film with "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter", now, didn't I? Damn, that just sullied the whole process right there, didn't it? Seeing as how "Lincoln" ends with him heading to the theater, and this film pretty much picks up right there, I recommend watching the two films back-to-back to get the whole story. Unless you choose believe that Lincoln fought vampires, in which case, use your own judgment.
This film is about the aftermath of the assassination (Spoiler Alert: Lincoln gets shot, and never learns how the play "Our American Cousin" ends.) But ask anyone who killed the President, and nearly everyone says the same thing: John Wilkes Booth. Just like Lee Harvey Oswald, most Americans believe that he acted alone. This film correctly points out that Booth was part of a larger conspiracy, but of the entire group that planned to kidnap or kill Lincoln, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward, Booth was the only one who succeeded with his part of the plan.
To heal the nation, and because Booth himself was shot while being captured, his co-conspirators were swiftly rounded up and given military trials in which convictions were nearly a foregone conclusion. It's very easy to draw a connection between the trampling of due process and the prisoners' civil rights that was done in the name of expediency and patriotism and, let's say, the containing of certain suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay in the years following 9/11, outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, without putting them on trial.
That's the only reason I can come up with for picking at this particular historical scab on our nation's legislative body - if they railroaded someone back in 1865, in the name of patriotism, they can do it again, and they probably will.
Otherwise, this is a pretty boring courtroom drama - the challenge is always to make legal proceedings interesting, like in last month's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", but there's only so much you can do. At least that film had a transvestite and some other colorful characters to spice things up - the 1860's were flat-out boring by comparison, even with a plot against the President. You can't really call it an action film when the most action that takes place is objections being overruled.
They tried to make things interesting by adding a little bit of Civil War battle in the beginning, and some flashbacks to what went down between Booth and the others - but those scenes were all talky-talky too, just more secret meetings between the conspirators. After the fateful night at Ford's theater, it's really all downhill from there, cinematically. They should have spent more screen time on the assassination and less on the aftermath, if you ask me.
Also starring James McAvoy (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Robin Wright (last heard in "A Christmas Carol"), Kevin Kline (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Hitchcock"), Colm Meaney (last seen in "Get Him to the Greek"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "Whatever Works"), Justin Long (last heard in "Alpha and Omega"), Alexis Biedel, James Badge Dale (last seen in "World War Z"), Johnny Simmons, Toby Kebbell, with cameos from Stephen Root (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), John Cullum (last seen in "The Night Listener"), Norman Reedus, Jonathan Groff (last heard in "Frozen").
RATING: 4 out of 10 witnesses for the prosecution
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