bobbyw24
12-05-2011, 06:55 AM
By Bill Kauffman | December 2, 2011
Even the most dedicated cinephile may have blinked last spring and missed the brief visit of Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” to the suburban multiplex. The film had a shelf life shorter than a Ding Dong in Chris Christie’s pantry. No, I take back that stupid joke. Not because I would care about the hyper-hyped Christie even if he were running, but because one of our two obese presidents has been first-rate—Grover Cleveland, the Buffalo anti-imperialist—and the other, William Howard Taft, at least sired a statesman, his son Robert.
“The Conspirator,” recently released on DVD, deserves an audience, especially in these dark days of never-ending wars and “See something, Say something” government-stoked paranoia. The film’s subject is the trial of Mary Surratt, the Maryland-born Catholic widow at whose Washington, D.C. boardinghouse bunked assorted members of the conspiracy responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (John Wilkes Booth was a visitor, not a boarder.) “She kept the nest that hatched the egg,” said President Andrew Johnson, whose failure to grant clemency to Mrs. Surratt was a low point of that drunken Tennessee tailor’s rocky tenure at the top.
Maryland Sen. Reverdy Johnson, the Lincoln pallbearer who was Mrs. Surratt’s first attorney, is the film’s voice of reason and constitutional fealty—“a military trial of civilians is an atrocity”—in a time of panic. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by an unrecognizable Kevin Kline, is the Dick Cheney-ish villain of the piece. It’s nice to see Stanton, a thoroughgoing bastard, get his. I expect he and Booth will meet Cheney soon enough in the sulfurous precincts of the afterworld.
The foreshadowing of post-9/11 America is deliberate but not clumsy. “The world has changed,” the sinister Secretary Stanton tells Senator Johnson. “Abandoning the Constitution is not the answer,” replies Johnson, sounding like, well, Ron Paul.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/redford-goes-ron-paul/
Even the most dedicated cinephile may have blinked last spring and missed the brief visit of Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” to the suburban multiplex. The film had a shelf life shorter than a Ding Dong in Chris Christie’s pantry. No, I take back that stupid joke. Not because I would care about the hyper-hyped Christie even if he were running, but because one of our two obese presidents has been first-rate—Grover Cleveland, the Buffalo anti-imperialist—and the other, William Howard Taft, at least sired a statesman, his son Robert.
“The Conspirator,” recently released on DVD, deserves an audience, especially in these dark days of never-ending wars and “See something, Say something” government-stoked paranoia. The film’s subject is the trial of Mary Surratt, the Maryland-born Catholic widow at whose Washington, D.C. boardinghouse bunked assorted members of the conspiracy responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (John Wilkes Booth was a visitor, not a boarder.) “She kept the nest that hatched the egg,” said President Andrew Johnson, whose failure to grant clemency to Mrs. Surratt was a low point of that drunken Tennessee tailor’s rocky tenure at the top.
Maryland Sen. Reverdy Johnson, the Lincoln pallbearer who was Mrs. Surratt’s first attorney, is the film’s voice of reason and constitutional fealty—“a military trial of civilians is an atrocity”—in a time of panic. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by an unrecognizable Kevin Kline, is the Dick Cheney-ish villain of the piece. It’s nice to see Stanton, a thoroughgoing bastard, get his. I expect he and Booth will meet Cheney soon enough in the sulfurous precincts of the afterworld.
The foreshadowing of post-9/11 America is deliberate but not clumsy. “The world has changed,” the sinister Secretary Stanton tells Senator Johnson. “Abandoning the Constitution is not the answer,” replies Johnson, sounding like, well, Ron Paul.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/redford-goes-ron-paul/