Light Through Windows: The Conspirator

Fans of painterly cinematography, of the conscious manipulation of images to create an effect, will want to see “The Conspirator,” Robert Redford’s new dramatization of the trial of Mary Surratt. A very painterly film, this one—think, maybe, of Johannes Vermeer and his pictures of light pouring through windows.

There is a lot of light through windows in “The Conspirator.” Scene after scene of light pouring through windows. But here the light is harsh—characters squint into it, uneasily—and the subjects are not the graceful maidens of Vermeer. They are tense soldiers and lawyers, angry and calculating politicians, frightened witnesses and family members. And there is Mary Surratt, played by Robin Wright, looking alternately serene and devout (when at prayer in her jail cell), or pained and distrustful and trapped (when she is in the trial court).

Mary Surratt was a confessed supporter of the Confederacy and the owner of the boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth met from time to time with others who conspired to strike a blow against the government by killing not only Lincoln, but Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Mary’s son John was heavily implicated in the plot (but never convicted) and in “The Conspirator” Mary is portrayed as being used by the government as bait to ensnare the son. She is eventually hung after a military tribunal, in which witnesses are traduced and the outcome appears to be pre-ordained by a government hungry for revenge and eager to douse, forever, the dying embers of southern rebellion.

The parallel to the controversy today over the legal status of detainees in the war on terror is evident enough. But anyone expecting standard-issue Hollywood liberal polemic will not find it in this movie. There is, first of all, plenty of room to doubt Mary Surratt’s innocence. And the rational for a military tribunal—which roughly parallels that for detainees in Guantanamo—is given a full hearing: the full dimensions of conspiracy against the government were not known and a civilian trial could compromise security.

And, too, the drama bristles with the seething grievances of a nation that has been severely traumatized. Just ended was an exhausting war, the bloodiest ever seen anywhere in history, one that was instigated—from the northern perspective—by rebels in pursuit of a morally besmirched cause. Explicit reference is made to the treatment of Union prisoners by the rebels, a reference surely to the infamous prison at Andersonville where more than 12,000 Union soldiers died of starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea and disease. The Confederate officer in charge of the prison was convicted of war crimes, and news of the conditions at the prison stoked Northern instincts for retribution. And after all of this, the President is shot in a conspiracy that was believed by many to be widespread. There were those in the North, and in the President’s cabinet (especially Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by Kevin Kline) who were determined to put the screws to the South.

And on the other side the argument in Mary Surratt’s favor that makes itself felt most strongly, though it is insinuated rather than stated, is one that might discomfit Redford and others of contemporary liberal disposition.  Because the entire conduct of the rigged trial would seem to be, in its way, a vindication of the Confederate cause. I was waiting for Mary to say to her lawyer, something like this: “Look at what is happening. Don’t you see it? This is what we were fighting against. You flatter yourself that you were fighting to end slavery or to preserve your precious Union. But what you have succeeded in preserving is the right of distant power to exercise its will, to have its way and to claim it is doing it for the general good. Now your side has won and we are all—you, me, everyone everywhere— going to have to pay the piper. Because now this power---it is located in Washington, but it might as well be on the moon for all it knows about me or my life and my family, or about you and yours—will always have its way, and will rationalize what it is doing, and later it will write the history that says it was doing the Lord's work because it was for the greater good.” 

The characters are trapped in their own necessarily thwarted understanding of their historical circumstances, an entrapment captured during the trial scenes with a kind of staccato imagery so that one glimpses the agonized faces of the participants as they might look in faded black and white photographs. The light from outside, from all of those windows, might be the light of the truths we would like to think are self-evident—about how individuals are innocent until proven guilty, about the  right to a trial before a jury of peers--the truths that persist outside, above and beyond our own limited understanding of our circumstances.

Except that in times such as those depicted in “The Conspirator,” or in such fraught times as our own, those truths can be too harsh to bear. The film would seem to dare us to condemn the men behind the trial of Mary Surratt. Americans today have largely acquiesced without great protest to the idea that detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom have been held for years now without legal counsel, are too dangerous to risk being set free, even if evidence against them might not stand up in a civil trial. And they have acquiesced, too, to a greatly enlarged government invasion of their own privacy.

Well, so we live in dangerous times, and conceivably the tribunals are a necessary concession to an extreme situation. However, I believe the torture of some of those detainees at Guantanamo is another matter, an unambiguous wrong, and a great stain on American honor. And the two issues--torture and the conduct of legal proceedings against the detainees--now cannot be separated since undoubtedly one of the reasons the authorities recoil from a civil trial is because much or all of the evidence they have against these men has been garnered through methods that would make the information inadmissable in a civil court.

No one thought to waterboard Mary Surratt or her confederates. And the movie makes clear that in her day, as in ours, fear is the real enemy of reason and sanity when the world seems dangerous. What is needed are clear heads, sober minds and sharp eyes to discern what truth we can in the ambiguous shadows of our own murky history. Armchair warriors, gossip merchants with megaphones, the politically shameless who would exploit legitimate fears for partisan ends—these all only make it harder to see the light.