The Conspirator was a Civil-War era film about the trial to find guilty the men who they believed had conspired to murder Abraham Lincoln.
The men, and one woman. What evolves is a sense of the national sentiment following the murder of President Lincoln, and how the American people needed to hold someone accountable for what happened. The JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City Bombing and the September 11th terrorist attacks serve as evidence of how this dynamic manifested itself in the 20th Century and 21st. Have we developed a less knee-jerk, wild-west system of justice now than we had in place circa 1865?
The Conspirator merely lays out how the country reacted, and examines how the evidence was used to come to a verdict in the trial against Mary Surratt. It is up to us to interpret whatever lesson or moral that might be drawn from it. But make no mistake, this film is aware of the values both of the prosecution and the defense. That is what makes the story so riveting.
As mentioned, the story centers around the legal defense of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a boarding house operator who had moved to Washington, D.C. after her father's death to operate a boarding house. Mary and her family had come from the south, and as such had confederate allegiance. However, as we see from flashbacks, Mary is ready to move forward from the conflict and tries to convince her son, John, to do likewise.
John, however, hates the union, and is closely tied with the band of men who have a plan to murder President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward.
It is the unhappy task of young attorney Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) to serve as counsel in her defense. Aiken was a union soldier, and the last thing he would want is for his friends, fellow soldiers and society to think that he shows sympathy for the confederates, and will effectively try to get a woman who was in some capacity responsible for Lincoln's murder off the hook. The American people mourned the death of Lincoln, and cried for anyone even suspected to have contributed to the plot ought to be sentenced to death by hanging.
Aiken pleads Senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to find a different defense attorney than him. But Johnson knows that Mary Surratt does not have a chance of innocence if a southern lawyer is appointed to the case. So Aiken visits Mary Surratt in prison. It is prickly at first, to be sure. He flat out tells her she's got to help him by providing an account of her involvement with the men she was boarding, and why her son was affilliated with them. He needs not only for her to convince the tribunal of Judge Advocate Generals that she was not an insider in the plot, but she has to convince Frederick. We see him wounded on the battlefield as the film opens, and he of course is looking down his nose at her as a southerner who favored the secession. Having said that, he grows to appreciate how torn she was between her duty to protect her son, John (Johnny Simmons), who had strong Confederate loyalty, and wanted to help Wilkes-Booth take some measure of revenge against the White House, and is in hiding following the assassination; and her desire to just move on with the reconstruction of the United States. She did resent the Union, which, after all, decimated the South and their well-being in order to get the concession they needed, and yet, as an exhausted women who was raising two children alone in the U.S. capitol, she was only too ready to prevent her children from hanging on to the vendetta that so many Confederates maintained against the North. When Aiken goes to check on her daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), we sense a very delicate mutual respect developing between the client and counsel.
Aiken learns not to judge her as a Confederate mother whose ill-will toward Lincoln must be evidence in and of itself that she contributed to the plot to assassinate Lincoln, but as a woman who did not play an active role in the proceedings of the Wilkes-Booth and his associates during their time as guests in her household, and whose intuitions as a matriarch would have prompted her to do anything in her power to have prevented her children from going out and inciting further rebel violence following the South's official surrender.
It's really fascinating to see McAvoy as Aiken, grow from an initial apathy towards Surratt, and the near-certainty that she would be hung; to being a lawyer who was fighting for a fair trial, such that she would not receive a death sentence unless the prosecution provided unequivocal evidence that she was involved first-hand in the logistics of the Lincoln assassination, as well as the attempts on Johnson and Seward.
Aiken's biggest thorn in the side here is Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) who was appointed by Lincoln, and by his side shortly after the murder. We at first understand Stanton's desire for justice, but then we see how blinded he is by the need for revenge, such that he's willing to influence the outcome of the trial to the extent that Mary Surratt is found guilty, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
It's easier to be impartial today to the Surratt proceedings. Back then, I can appreciate the moral ethical debacle that Frederick Aiken was in, as well as the internal conflict that Surratt had over her citizenship as an American and her history as a Confederate. She accepted the treatment so well, and yet the bitterness and heartache is palpable on her face.
The film becomes very suspenseful as we realize that Surratt is facing down a public hanging, much like the one we saw in 2010's True Grit, and is very much at the mercy of the wrangling between the prosecution and the defense. It comes down to whether or not Aiken can get a Writ of Habeas Corpus from a judge, and gain Mary Surratt a retrial with a jury of her peers, and perhaps a reduced sentence given the lack of substantiation of her involvement in the plot. Over the course of the film we learn that she wasn't entirely in the dark about her son and Wilkes Booth's plans to overthrow the president, how could she have been, but we learn to internalize that her being under the same roof as these men did not make it fair to judge that she was a key player in the coordinated attack that played out. And we get a great sense of her humanity as we see the flashbacks of her as a first and foremost devoted mother.
Captain America: The First Avenger, you've had a nice run at the top of the list. But you have ably been moved to runner up status. The Conspirator was the best movie of 2011.
Four stars.