The Conspirator: film et charge politique?

Sortie sur nos écrans du film The Conspirator dirigé par Robert Redford. Le personnage principal est une femme accusée d'avoir collaboré avec John Wilkes Booth et ses acolytes pour assassiner Abraham Lincoln. LA critique du NY Times...

"But rather than trust the audience’s ability to think through the thorny historical and ideological issues at the heart of the story, Mr. Redford and the screenwriter, James Solomon, descend, perhaps inadvertently, into Confederate apologetics. The triumphant North is represented by bullying, brass-fronted soldiers; imperious bureaucrats; or smug, wine-sipping swells, like Aiken’s old comrades (Justin Long and James Badge Dale) and his socially anxious wife (Alexis Bledel).

The South, in contrast, is embodied by the stoical Mary Surratt and her passionate daughter and also, more tellingly, by the other accused assassins, a bunch of taciturn, soulful fellows who sit in the dock like a country-and-western house band resting up before a set with Waylon Jennings.

They are so cool, and their tears on the gallows so moving! Well and good — Dixie sentimentality is woven into the fabric of American culture. But it is curious that “The Conspirator,” while it includes a scene in which Mary speaks with tragic, misty eloquence about “the cause,” declines to note, even in passing, that her cause was the defense of a way of life built on the labor of human chattel. If you think I’m nit-picking or being politically correct, try to imagine a movie about the Nuremberg trials that never mentioned Jews, or a film about modern terrorism from which the word Islam was banished.

The omission matters because it undermines the film’s integrity, helping to turn what might have been a vivid and thoughtful ethical drama into a flat, tendentious history lecture. Ms. Wright, usually a surpassingly subtle actress with impressive emotional range, seems to have based this performance almost entirely on old photographs. But her stillness is mystifying rather than enigmatic, and it is hard to feel anything but the most abstract pity for Mary."

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/movies/the-conspirator-directed-by-robert-redford-review.html