The Trial of Aaron Sorkin

In which the jury returns after an exhaustive/ing deliberation

Apologies to our paying subscribers, who have been waiting for (or fearing) this piece for longer than we would like. We were dragged off task by some late-middle-age ‘challenges’, including minor surgery, elder-care responsibilities, and a bad back.

Here we are with the final part of our epic survey of the screen works of Aaron Sorkin. As with the first part, we’re making this one available to all subscribers; you can see links to the rest of the series (behind a paywall) here. For our esteemed paying subscribers, our next ludicrous-yet-exclusive endeavour will be a series of pieces about on-screen representations of Sherlock Holmes over the decades.

In this piece we look at Sorkin’s three most recent films, all written and directed by Sorkin himself:

Molly’s Game (2017) The real-life story of Molly Bloom, who ran underground celebrity poker games in LA and New York, which led to unwitting contact with the Russian mob and, shortly afterwards, Bloom’s arrest and trial.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) The real-life story of the protests/riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the subsequent trial of assorted liberals, radicals, surrealists and Black Power activists.

Being the Ricardos (2021) The real-life story of a troubled on-set week in the life of American celebrity sweethearts Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

So: the Sorkin-ness. What have we learned?

Sorkin benefits from directorial pushback.

Various directors have battled with Sorkin’s word counts over the years, in the same way a gardener battles with Japanese knotweed. Some were victorious (David Fincher with The Social Network); some made valiant but flawed attempts (Mike Nichols with Charlie Wilson’s War); some were absolutely flattened (Danny Boyle with Steve Jobs).

These days, Sorkin simply directs his own scripts. His move into direction has been paralleled recently by a few actors, including Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele. Perhaps the easy democracy of visual tech, and the demonstrable success of neophyte YouTubers, has broken down some of the mystical patina that used to adhere to direction. Sure, you can be an auteur if you want to — and Gerwig and Peele both have a strong visual game — but it has been comprehensively demonstrated that 99% of viewers won’t really mind if you can barely centre a frame.

Sorkin is perfectly capable of centring a frame, but — recalling Woody Allen’s line about masturbation being sex with someone you love — his direction choices squarely centre his scripts. Much as I love his obsession with words and dialogue, his meat-and-potatoes approach to visual storytelling can be a bit deadening.

Take the opening sequence of Molly’s Game, a dramatic skiing accident that sets up the central character’s biography. In the script, the uninterrupted one-person voiceover that runs alongside this opening sequence takes up nine pages, pretty much exactly the same length of the bravura two-person sequence that opens The Social Network. It’s interesting that in the latter, Fincher responded to Sorkin’s verbiage by toning the visuals right down in this sequence: you get one establishing shot of Mark and Erica at a table, and from then on you see nothing but close-ups of their faces. Fincher looked at the wall of dialogue, realised how significant it was in setting up the film, and chose to strip everything else right back.

Sorkin — a man who has happily admitted many times that he doesn’t care about visuals — goes completely the other way. He stuffs the opening sequence of Molly’s Game with all kinds of visual pyrotechnics: archive sports footage, competitive skiing sequences, and the accident itself. As a result, the viewer struggles to fully digest either the dense, rapidly-delivered voiceover or the complicated visual story.

Sorkin is a charmingly open book.

Despite many of his films being based on real-life stories, most of Sorkin’s heroes are essentially the same person. Sorkin’s preoccupations and biographical vulnerabilities emerge repeatedly: the search for the perfect creative dyad (Studio 60, Being the Ricardos, The West Wing), struggles with addiction (The West Wing, Studio 60, Molly’s Game, Charlie Wilson’s War), and ambivalence about fatherhood (The West Wing, Steve Jobs, Being the Ricardos, Molly’s Game).

Most consistent of all is Sorkin’s idea of what it means to be ‘clever’: both how he defines and presents ‘cleverness’, and the innate, almost moral worth he attaches to it. From Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men in 1992 to Molly Bloom in 2017, almost all of Sorkin’s heroes are fast-talking, hyper-verbal oddities who can reel off obscure factoids and lists of statistics. So long as they are ‘clever’ in this very specific University Challenge sense, Sorkin confidently expects us to forgive their common faults (egotism, selfishness, and usually some form of addiction or compulsive behaviour).

And we do usually warm to his heroes; even Mark Zuckerberg, whom Sorkin wrote as an explicit anti-hero, wins our sympathetic involvement. But this isn’t because of their ‘cleverness’, which makes the viewer feel like they’re being stalked by a six-year-old who knows far too much about dinosaurs. It’s because Sorkin’s central characters tend to be courageous, funny and vulnerable, and because they make considerable sacrifices in the pursuit of normie liberal principles (democracy, honour, hard work, truth-telling). Similarly, we don’t dislike Sorkin’s ‘stupid’ characters because they don’t know the GDP of Portugal in the financial year 1994–5; we dislike them because in Sorkin’s world, ‘stupid’ people are usually also deeply unpleasant.

Now, people can use ‘cleverness’ as a defence against intimacy or criticism, and sometimes — as with his interpretation of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network — Sorkin shows that this is what his characters are doing. But more frequently, you have to conclude that he adds this stuff in because he’s genuinely impressed by people who can casually list the top five Belgian exports, the exact wording of nineteenth-century statutes, or the precise number of qualified teachers in Alabama. It’s kind of sweet.

Structure is king.

Dialogue aside, Sorkin’s genius lies in the beauty of his narrative structures. He’s drawn to legal dramas: Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7 are structured around legal processes, as are A Few Good Men and The Social Network. He has said that the legal format is a canny way to handle exposition and get lumps of information in front of the viewer. (In showing how people behave under pressure, it’s also good for character development.) The legal process is also one of persuasion, of using (or manipulating) information to lead people in a certain direction, and for a writer as didactic as Sorkin you can see the appeal.

There’s another reason, though: a trial has multiple points of structural tension.

I once read that tennis is a god-tier sport because of the way tension is built into the point-by-point scoring system. The drama is occasioned not only by the players’ talent or biographies, or by luck or circumstance; it is also structural. There are break points and game points and set points and match points, and there are also all the points before the ‘big’ points (and sometimes even the points before the points before the big points). Think of the strained silence in a tennis crowd when someone is serving to go 40-0 up (which is psychologically very different from 30-0 up), or is serving to avoid a break point. Even the dullest match is studded with multiple structural moments of tension and release.

Similarly, any trial has inherent structural tension that can be put to use by pretty much any decent screenwriter. Sorkin, though, goes one further. He uses the structural legal tension in parallel to a second narrative structure, which usually revolves around a personal psychological wound that is invisible to most of the other characters. In Molly’s Game, this is the cruel bad luck of the skiing accident; in The Social Network it’s Mark getting dumped by Erica; in The Trial of the Chicago 7 it’s what really happened between Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis during the Chicago riot. These secondary narratives are usually established in the opening scenes, and like Chekhov’s gun they lie on the mantelpiece throughout the drama. Lesser legal dramas culminate in the verdict; Sorkin’s culminate in the quiet, intimate resolution of this second narrative.

These enigmatic ‘Rosebud’-style mysteries book-end many of his non-legal scripts too. In Steve Jobs it’s Jobs’s relationship with his daughter Lisa; in Being the Ricardos it’s Lucille Ball’s longing for real-life domesticity. The message — that people are fundamentally unknowable, their strongest motivations often hidden — rings true. But this technique also produces a wonderful structural catharsis. It’s all about the symmetry.

Sorkin is no longer paralysed by attractive women.

Earlier in his career, Sorkin had a terrible habit of taking perfectly accomplished female characters and having them fall over (CJ in The West Wing), be robbed of the power of speech in professional settings (Demi Moore in A Few Good Men, Annette Bening in The American President), be embarrassingly under-dressed in public places (CJ and Ashley in The West Wing, Harriet in Studio 60, Annette Bening in The American President), or unwittingly leave their knickers on other people’s floors (poor old Donna in The West Wing). All fun and games in one sense, except that Sorkin rarely hands out this treatment to his male characters (unless you count that scene in The West Wing in which Josh has to hold a meeting while wearing a bright yellow bib and brace). Like Dickens, Sorkin could write believable, fully human females so long as they were old. The young, cute ones had to have a sharp edge of delirium, their cognitive functions occasionally buckling under the strain of possessing both brains and tits. I think we can agree that this was what psychologists call projection.

Maybe it’s the criticism he’s received; maybe it’s the passage of time (Toby is very fond of that Socrates quote likening the effect of the young male libido to ‘being chained to a lunatic’); maybe Sorkin has finally accepted some of the most basic premises of modern feminism. Whatever it is, there’s been a notable and welcome change in the way Sorkin writes attractive women. The transition began with Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), in which Julia Roberts’s Republican activist Joanne Herring is completely in charge of every single thing she does. Then we had The Social Network, in which Rooney Mara’s Erica is beautiful and also smart, thoughtful, dignified, brave and utterly consequential. Neither of them fell over, forgot how to talk, or left their lingerie behind in public places.

This new tendency is beautifully showcased in Molly’s Game. Jessica Chastain (a member of my personal ‘proper grown-up women actors’ club, along with Cate Blanchett and Keeley Hawes) puts in a fabulous performance as Bloom, as you would expect. But what’s really interesting is what Sorkin does with Bloom’s self-presentation.

The wardrobe and make-up people did a fantastic job here. Bloom wears clothes and cosmetics that position her as a woman who deploys her face and body in a very specific way, one that is a rebellion against her social class (Bloom was the daughter of toney college professors). She chooses to showcase a precisely calibrated degree of loose, slightly vulgar sexiness: the necklines are low and lacy, the skirts are short and shiny, and the cleavage is a deep V (very out of style these days, but everywhere in 2005). But all of this is frequently paired with unthreatening concessions to comfort or necessity: reading glasses, cheap chenille knitwear. She’s saying: I reject the class-based expectations of my oppressive family; I like annoying my dad; I’m a gorgeous symbol of the status of the men in this room; but I’m also in charge, and have a strong sense of my own autonomy and comfort. Unlike most on-screen representations of sexy women, this one feels utterly grounded (Chastain’s otherworldly beauty aside).

Bloom is the kind of woman to whom clothes, make-up and personal presentation really matter, but Sorkin doesn’t use this as a character note about silliness or ill-discipline. It is not intended to be read as a sign that she lacks intelligence, insight or power; if anything, it is communicating the opposite. It is telling us just how well Bloom understands her audiences: first, the celebs and sports stars and city boys who attend her poker games, and then the tabloid readers and TV viewers who will help to decide her fate. Both audiences like pretty, glamorous women, but neither audience likes women to be snotty, posh or intimidating. They don’t want an impossibly stylish glamazon, remote and unattainable; they want the beautiful girl-next-door, someone accessible, someone who makes a lot of effort but also looks good in an oversized cardigan from the bargain racks at the local mall.

Bloom understands how to project the right qualities in the right proportions, which is a very difficult thing to achieve. She understands these things much better than her otherwise highly competent lawyer Jaffey (Idris Elba), who is initially irritated that his young, bookish daughter idolises Bloom, and then over the course of the film comes to understand why.

The fact that Sorkin as a director was happy for this much care to be taken over the details of Bloom’s self-presentation feels like a real breakthrough to me. It's significant that he is getting interested in the semiotics of women’s presentation, the complex messages that women send with their clothes and cosmetics, or the absence of them. (There is a similar intra-female interrogation of weight, beauty and costume in Being The Ricardos, as Ball’s on-screen female sidekick struggles with her assigned ‘unattractiveness’.) We haven’t, as a sex, asked to be defined by these things, but if these are the weapons we’re given, we’ll use ‘em.

Spotting that Jaffey’s daughter is reading The Crucible, Bloom says: ‘You know they didn’t actually burn any witches in Salem? That’s a myth. They hanged them or drowned them. Sometimes they crushed them under heavy objects.’ Sorkin is finally working out that for some women, coping with other people’s expectations and prejudices is like being slowly crushed under a heavy object. And he is embracing the multiple dramatic possibilities that come from that.

Actors love working with Sorkin’s scripts, and they bring their A game.

Looking back over these pieces, it’s striking to note all the actors who have blown the bloody doors off in a Sorkin production. Some of them were relative unknowns who made their name (especially on The West Wing): some of them were global superstars playing against type, or turning up for a small cameo just so they didn’t miss their chance to deliver some Sorkin dialogue.

It’s not universally true, of course: Tom Cruise was somewhat defeated in A Few Good Men, Matthew Perry’s comic talents were criminally under-used in Studio 60, and everyone stank in The Newsroom. (Never getting that time back.) But most of the time, Sorkin’s scripts get the absolute best out of some already very talented performers. This is a classic example of making your own luck. Sorkin writes scripts that good actors want to perform, and in turn they deliver performances that make the scripts look even better than they did on the page.

His words draw out qualities that some actors find difficult to replicate elsewhere; with the best will in the world, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff have never been as good again as they were in The West Wing, and Tom Hanks (much as we love him) has never been so un-Tom-Hanks-y as he was in Charlie Wilson’s War. As Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos Nicole Kidman reminds us of the talent she displayed in her early films such as To Die For, long before she started churning out dull thrillers for Netflix; Julia Roberts does a wonderful character turn in Charlie Wilson’s War. Brad Pitt is quiet and unshowy in Moneyball; Javier Bardem is a revelation as the happy-go-lucky showman Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos. Jack Nicholson’s turn in A Few Good Men will form the second line of his obituary, as will Martin Sheen’s turn as President Bartlet in The West Wing. Chris O’Dowd has a wonderful tiny comic turn in Molly’s Game, and Sacha Baron Cohen makes a fabulous comic duo with a (literally) dopey Jeremy Strong in The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Sorkin is Gen X’s favourite earnest, well-intentioned Boomer.

Strong — who also appears briefly in Molly’s Game — of course made his name in Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, another set of scripts that actors found irresistible. There’s something in the comparison between Armstrong (or more properly, Armstrong’s writers’ room) and Sorkin: neither shy away from a sheer tonnage of dialogue, and both are great at mean jokes that turn on the love of language. (Shiv Roy’s description of her actual husband Tom Wambsgans as ‘a highly interchangeable modular part’ could have been written by Sorkin, if he were 20 years younger.) Both wrote long-running, cast-of-thousands, character-driven, critically-adored TV series that went behind the curtain in global power-centres. Both are as interested in interpersonal dynamics as they are in geopolitical forces. Both series had enormous impacts despite being watched by relatively small upmarket audiences. And both series, of course, deal in contemporary politics and the exercise of power, from the intimate to the international.

The big difference is that Sorkin is an American Boomer romantic, and Armstrong is a British Gen X cynic. Succession went right up to the edge of our current desperate moment in its plots about gaping nihilistic tech-bros and fascistic Presidents, but it always retained an ironic distance. Its sharp humour distracts us and soothes the horror. Sorkin, by contrast, draws a bright line between things that are fit for comedy and things that are deadly serious. He repeatedly sticks his head straight into the political wood-chipper, earnestly interrogating 9/11 and the Iraq War and the nature of media and the meaning of justice, and the general nitty-gritty difficulty of exercising power in an imperfect world. He does this with an entire, wholehearted sincerity that feels both courageous and old-fashioned; courageous in part because it’s old-fashioned, because his sincerity makes him such an easy target for snarky disparagement. Armstrong does a brilliant job of pointing out how shit everything is; Sorkin tries to tell us how, if we really try, we might be able to make things a little bit less shit. The second of these has always been a thankless task.

Armstrong has made no public comment on Sorkin (although it’s rumoured that Sorkin was a massive fan of Succession). But Sorkin’s good standing among the wider group of broadly liberal/lefty British Gen X cynics — including those in The Metropolitan household — is quite a feat, when you think about it. We grew up during the Cold War under the Reagan—Thatcher double-act; we spent our childhoods and teenage years disparaging the US and feeling furious that our government was holding the school bully’s coat. And yet Sorkin has persuaded millions of us to spend hours in the company of American people who valorise patriotism, nationalism, militarism, duty, the White House, the Marine Corps and boring old liberal Western democracy. You might call it witchcraft. I call it talent.

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If you’re new to our Sorkin season, here’s where we started - in media res, as Sorkin himself so often does.