Argentina, 1985

Argentinian writer/director Santiago Mitre spins this taught and rousing historical courtroom drama about the events surrounding the 1985 "Trial of the Juntas." This 16-week publicly broadcast proceeding was a major political event in which a civilian court tried former military leaders for brutal crimes committed while the country was under their right-wing dictatorship. While not as well known in America, this was a Nuremberg-level turning point for the nation and perhaps as critical as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was enacted eleven years later.

Ricardo Darín (star of Mitre’s White Elephant and The Summit) and well-known for international hits like The Secret in Their Eyes and Wild Tales) heads up a terrific cast in the role of the Chief Counsel for the Prosecution, Julio César Strassera. The reluctant lawyer is chosen to make the government's case against the military junta for alleged crimes against humanity after the military declined to press charges. With Argentina's weak democratic government in power for less than two years, the task seems daunting, boarding on futile. With all senior lawyers unwilling to risk their reputations or safety to sign on to such a publically divisive trial, Strassera and his young deputy prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), quickly assemble a group of recent law grads and rookie lawyers who do yeoman's work digging up evidence and lining up people to testify to the junta’s myriad monstrosities.

The outcome of the movie seems a forgone conclusion. If you know Argentinian history, or if you've read even the smallest synopsis of this film before watching it, you know that this was the first and only civil court trial of war crimes in any Latin American country, and you probably know the outcome. Also, if you've seen Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg or Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, then you're pretty sure that, even if the trial isn't an out-and-out victory, a film of this type probably doesn't exist unless the ending is pretty upbeat. Yet somehow none of that prevents the picture from feeling riveting and suspenseful.

The comparisons to Kramer and Sorkin are apt. I mean, this is a movie that builds to a climax in which a guy makes a speech that could change the future of his nation. And Mitre is not above sentimentality, hagiography, and sweeping music underscoring momentous moments (though I loved how much music feels authentically mid-'80s in so much of the film). Additionally, the comical youth and inexperience of so many characters and the many other moments of levity recall old-school Hollywood courtroom pictures and Sorkinesque storytelling. The big difference here is that, unlike Kramer and Sorkin, not only is the humour actually funny, there is as much truth found in the lighter moments as in the most sombre or damning testimony. So many of these characters find amusement in the face of danger and pressure in ways that feel casual rather than heroic. That lightness of touch also sets the story apart from so many films of this ilk that feature perfunctory subplots about tensions within the families of the intrepid crusading lawyers. In one brief but memorable scene, Strassera receives his first of many scary phone calls threatening his family. He goes to tell his wife and she brushes it off with, “Is that the threat guy, again? He’s been calling all day.” And when Strassera sends his young son to spy on his teenage daughter because he fears the older man she's dating might be a mole, the daughter sits him down and basically says, "Dad, this isn't that kind of movie," and then essentially exits the picture to get on with her own life.

Argentine, 1985 reminded me of many of the best period political dramas of the recent century. The film is not shot as inventively as Pablo Larraín’s No (2012) or Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (2010), but the cramped frames, brownish costumes, and minimal but distinctive props and set dressing evoking the period without hitting the viewer over the head did recall those movies. One thing I appreciated so much about this feature was how easily I could envision an inferior TV miniseries version as Mitre nimbly put across large swaths of information in such a breezy style. The sequences where the team of young law students go out to find people willing to testify would be a whole episode if this were a TV show. But, other than providing many scenes for many actors to deliver excellent performances (which is all I really see contemporary TV as being good for) the details about how this was done are unnecessary to tell this story from this angle.

Over the many days of televised courtroom proceedings, Strassera presented over 700 cases of accused criminal offences undertaken by the brutal regime and over 800 witness testimonies. Citizens throughout the nation and the world learned via first-hand personal accounts of the hitherto unimaginable brutality, violence, threats, and suppression dolled out by the dictatorship against the citizens of Argentina. Mitre obviously doesn't show all 700 witnesses, rather he creates a montage of overflowing testimony focusing on a few that really captured the consciousness of the citizenry. Principle among these is Adriana Calvo's harrowing account of giving birth while handcuffed, battered, and bandaged in custody. Calvo (superbly played by Laura Paredes) was the first witness to recount their ordeal before the five judges at the actual trial, and her words bookend this pastiche of testimonies from the disappeared.

Argentina, 1985 is not a perfect picture. It's got plenty of cliches and over-simplified moments, but it upends more of the courtroom drama tropes as it gives in to. And, unlike far too many recent fictionalized accounts of major political trials (I'm looking at you Trial of the Chicago 7!) it doesn't pervert the truth of the events or the essence of its characters to satisfy a contemporary ideology. Yet this is a timely picture as so many people in so many nations are so committed to forgetting the past and either intentionally or unwittingly dooming us to repeat egregious mistakes, allowing and all but ensuring abuses of power that should be unacceptable in any functioning democracy.

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