Robert Redford 43 years ago

It “is a story that very few, if any, know.” And if that weren’t enough, it’s a “story that sits inside of a story that everybody knows — the Lincoln assassination,” Robert Redford said as if delivering the Gettysburg Address at the Toronto International Film Festival while shopping around his undistributed film, The Conspirator.  The angle this time is that assassination suspect Mary Surratt (played by Robin Wright), the first woman to be executed in America, was a pawn used by prosecutors to lure back her son for trial.

Redford intimated that America today is little different than before, during and immediately after the Civil War.  “History is a series of loops.  We keep repeating ourselves.  Now we’re living in a condition of confusion and anxiety and fear and that was the same thing 150 years ago.” Obama beware?  American injustice is the scourge of the world?  Capital punishment is barbarous and unfair, Lincoln was really a closet Democrat? Redford’s political opponents are (fill in the aphorism).

Redford will teach us a history lesson disguised as entertainment and hyped with the sanctity of art.  Backward Americans in need of repair only need to see Redford’s version of the truth to leave the revival tent Robespierre enlightened.

It may not play between Manhattan and Malibu, but Toronto is the right place for a movie with all those history re-writes and highfalutin platitudes.