The Conspirator

Directed by Robert Redford

(PG-13)

*

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Director Robert Redford has turned an important story from America’s past into a “stodgy, ham-handed waxwork,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. In 1865, after John Wilkes Booth was shot down for assassinating Abraham Lincoln, a number of fellow plotters were arrested and tried—among them, Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a widow whose boardinghouse was a meeting place for the conspirators and whose son was a suspect. Was Surratt guilty? Redford doesn’t seem to care, said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. While The Conspirator works to be accurate in its particulars, the history it presents is distorted by Redford’s desire to highlight parallels with post-9/11 America. He’s bent on portraying Surratt’s sentencing by a military tribunal as “a grievous injustice that violated the most cherished ideals of the country she was accused of trying to destroy.” Still, there’s at least one reason to look past this film’s “clumsy stabs at ideological relevance,” said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. Surratt’s story has been overlooked for so long, it’s “damn interesting” just to learn its details.