Movie Review: The Conspirator

Robin Wright plays a doomed woman. Photo / Supplied

This earnest but rather stilted historical drama is the first production by The American Film Company, founded in 2008 by internet stockbroking billionaire (and Chicago Cubs owner) Joe Ricketts.

Like the two other movies in the works - one about John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and the other about Paul Revere's midnight ride - it seeks to dramatise important events in American history while remaining faithful to the facts.

In this case, the story is about Mary Surratt, the only female charged in connection with the April 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and (spoiler alert) the first woman hanged by the US Government. Surratt owned a boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators had met.

Frederick Aiken (McAvoy), a soldier-turned-lawyer, is assigned to defend Surratt (Wright, who seems for much of the time to be posing for a portrait of the Virgin Mary) and becomes aware that she is being used as a hostage to draw out the prosecutor's real target.

It's an accomplished enough retelling, though it has more the whiff of a social studies project than a nail-biting drama about it.

The script is littered with pithy lines ("A military trial of a civilian is an atrocity"; "In our grief, let us not betray our better judgment"; "Abandoning the Constitution is not the answer") that make plain its intended application to events in post-9/11 America.

But it's an experience that is possibly more improving than entertaining.

Stars: 3/5
Cast: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Tom Wilkinson, Kevin Kline Director: Robert Redford
Running time: 123 mins
Rating: M (violence)
Verdict: Worthy and accomplished.

-TimeOut