What’s With The Attitude?

In a USA Today piece about Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator, Anthony Breznican says it “follows the race to hunt down the small band of Confederate sympathizers” who helped plot to murder President Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet.

And yet Breznican decides against mentioning what I reported on 4.16 after reading James Solomon‘s Conspirator script, which is that (a) the plot and the chase are handled in flashbacks and (b) the basic plotline of The Conspirator involves a young attorney (James McAvoy) being reluctantly assigned to defend Mary Surratt in her conspiracy trial.

“The main arc belongs to McAvoy,” I explained. “He starts out actively hostile, but comes to see that Surratt has been wrongly charged. But Penn, it appears, will provide the lump-in-the-throat moments.” Redford hedges with Breznican about Surratt’s guilt or innocence, but the script I read seemed fairly resolved about the matter — i.e., she may have been circumstantially guilty in a sense, but she basically got a bum rap.

Then Breznican says a curiously hostile thing — he describes the film as “Law & Order: Civil War Unit.” Which is basically a way of saying “perhaps this movie isn’t so hot with no distributor and all…it seems to me like it might be a little tepid and formuliac, kind of like a TV series.”

I didn’t detect any hint in the piece that Breznican had read Solomon’s script, so why didn’t he do so if he’s going to describe it for his readers? Solomon’s script didn’t feel to me like any Law and Order-type procedural, I can tell you. What I read felt like solid first-rate material — “a sturdily-written, high-calibre thing,” as I said on 4.16. “And there’s no missing the grace and gravitas woven into Surratt’s character.”

Breznican sounds like a bright youngish guy (which he is) half-dismissing the work of a much older guy from another era who hasn’t directed a really good film since 1994′s Quiz Show, and implying that Redford is possibly over the hill. That’s how it read to me, at least. The young getting onto the old.

14 thoughts on “What’s With The Attitude?”

Have been looking forward to this….Robin Wright Penn rules

and an Oscar nod is hers to covet. Talky it might be….

Production Design should be excellent.

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I agree on Robin Wright-Penn. Forrest Gump came out when I was 10 and I’ve had a chub for her ever since. I used to study the scene where she played guitar nude to see if i could spot any hint of nipple or fluff. Good times.

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bligh, that’s 15 years of chub, you might want to consult a physician.

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Bahahahahaha i knew someone would say that! The day Robin Wright-Penn dies, my chub dies.

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It’s always appreciated when commenters elevate and deepen the topic at hand.

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Heh-heh…he said DEEPen.

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Saw a PBS documentary about the hunt for Boothe and the conspiracy. Why go for a court room drama when the story is tailor made for a movie treatment. I know most Americans don’t know Lincoln’s death was part of a Godfather style plan to cripple our government.

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“I know most Americans don’t know Lincoln’s death was part of a Godfather style plan to cripple our government.”

And now I’m remembering Jon Polito on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” as one of the running gags of his character – Detective Crosetti – was his constantly saying the same thing.

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bitplayer, Harrison Ford was attached to a project in that vein called MANHUNT back when I was in High School…

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I’d like a post-Lincoln assassination movie where they make parallels to Boothe and the tea-baggers.

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Redford is GOD. Endless respect.

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I won’t be wasting my time with this one. What is with the lard a$s re-enactors! I realize the obsessives who play dress up on weekends (and have their own uniforms?) get cast in these movies, and if they choose to eat Big Macs in lieau of hardtack it’s there business. But I’d rather see a short, skinny soldier whose uniform is 85% accurate, than one whose unifrom is 100% and BMI 85. Pretty soon, you’ll see Civil War soldiers riding those motorized hover-round chairs.

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