A very stuffy Madame Tussaud's history lesson from director Robert Redford, which replicates the self-consciousness of his movie about the Afghan war, Lions for Lambs. It has the same dewy-eyed liberal need to rebuke the excesses of the right, while insisting on its own, unimpeachable patriotism. The Conspirator is about the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865 and the dubious conviction on conspiracy charges of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a boarding-house keeper and mother of the fugitive John Surratt, wanted far more urgently than Mary on the same count. The subtextual parallels are not with the 1963 murder of Kennedy with its resulting wave of shock and sorrow, but of course with the 9/11 attacks, and the aggressive new mood of vengeance. This movie focuses on the proto-Guantánamo use of military tribunals to try the Lincoln conspirators, with the consequent abolition of normal civilian rights. Secretary of war Edwin Stanton, played by Kevin Kline, is made to look pretty Dick Cheneyish in his bullish insistence on the security of the state taking preference over everything else. Yet with all the costumes and the mutton-chop whiskers and the peering over spectacles, this is a very stately, bland piece of work, perhaps best shown to high school history classes.