Film Review: Trial of the Chicago 7

Aaron Sorkin gave his audience a choice. Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 pulled viewers into an intense, emotional tale, of a case against a group of activist charged with inciting a riot ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in protest of the Vietnam War. The choice he gives his audience is to decide what justice really is and how to confront it. The Trial of the Chicago 7 had previously been known as the case against eight defendants -- seven white anti-war protesters and an unrelated defendant from the Black Panther Party who was on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement.

Sorkin takes his audience back and forth from bloody protest scenes to a courtroom where the justice system operated in league with unjust law enforcement. Highlighting the white activists punctuated the most grave injustice in the inclusion of the Black Panther, Bobby Seale. Sorkin portrays the defendants as sympathetic characters, confronting the the center of power in the form of the federal government.

The dramatization of the painful conflicts was a stark remember of the same choice folks singer Pete Seeger offered in his use of Ecclesiastes 3, from which he pulls the words for the song "To Everything There Is a Season." Seeger quotes directly from the Scripture that "For everything there is a season... a time to kill, and a time to heal." But Seeger adds one critical word with emphasis: "turn, turn, turn." As Sorkin later does in The Trial of the Chicago 7, Seeger admits there is a context for action, but in every one of those moments we are given a choice, in particular when confronted with an injustice.