Je termine tout juste, avec un peu de retard, l'écoute du film Les conspirateurs de Robert Redford. J'ai apprécié le film dans son ensemble, principalement le fait qu'on s'intéresse à cette partie de l'histoire rarement exploitée dans les séries télévisées et les films. Je ne m'attendais assurément pas à un documentaire et chaque réalisateur approche son travail sous un angle précis en fonctions de divers intérêts (commande, budget, valeurs, etc.). Mon plaisir a cependant été légèrement gâché par le message éthique de Redford (on suppose quil réagit à l'ère Bush jr), caricatural à souhait dans certaines scènes, particulièrement pendant le procès. Sans être aussi dur que le critique du NY Times (plus bas), j'aurais apprécié un peu plus de finesse dans les échanges et le jeu des acteurs. Je ne bouderai cependant ce film au moment de concocter la liste de films historiques que je propose généralement à mes élèves pour leur travail de session. Un bon film qui aurait pu être un grand film...
"On trial for her life, Mary is defended by Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), a decommissioned captain in the Union Army. An ambitious young lawyer, Aiken is initially reluctant to be the advocate of a suspected traitor, but he is cajoled into taking the assignment by Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), a powerful Democratic senator from Maryland. And as he becomes acquainted with Mary and her daughter, Anna (Evan Rachel Wood), Aiken becomes passionately dedicated to proving Mary’s innocence, or at least saving her life.
He finds, though, that the deck is stacked, and the audience may feel the same way, in spite of the movie’s show of fidelity to the historical record. The chief prosecutor, Joseph Holt, is played by Danny Huston, whose silken baritone and crooked smile are so immediately indicative of duplicity that the filmmakers might as well have cast a talking snake. Colm Meaney, as the head of the tribunal, is less sinister but hardly sympathetic, and the behind-the-scenes heavy, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, is portrayed by Kevin Kline with stiff, stagey malevolence. With his tight, unsmiling mouth and severe parson’s beard, Stanton is an authoritarian bogeyman — a mean Republican! — designed to scare modern liberals.
His defense of the political efficacy and moral necessity of fear-mongering is balanced, weakly, by evocations of the grief-stricken, traumatized state of the nation in the wake of war and political terror. 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)."
La critique du Times au complet:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/movies/the-conspirator-directed-by-robert-redford-review.html
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