Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Judge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Dobkin (2014)

    The Judge has neither the scope nor the depth to justify its 141-minute running time.  This is a very familiar familial-legal drama – the screenplay by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque is original only in the technical sense.  Hotshot Chicago lawyer Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr) makes a good living defending clients whom he knows are often guilty.  His professional life is more successful than his personal one:  Hank is going through a divorce with his wife (Sarah Lancaster) and a battle for custody of their only child Lauren (Emma Tremblay).  He returns to Carlinville, Indiana, where he grew up, for his mother’s funeral – having been estranged for years from his father Joseph (Robert Duvall), a long-sitting state court judge.   As usual in this kind of piece, (a) home is the place the protagonist walked away from because (b) family life was full of unhappy memories in the form of (c) a few key traumatic events in childhood and adolescence.  For example, Hank’s elder brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio) was a promising baseball player until he was injured when the car the teenage Hank was driving crashed.  (Glen now runs a local motor supplies shop!)  The mental handicap of their younger brother Dale (Jeremy Strong) symbolises the emotionally crippled state of all the men in the Palmer family.   Judge Palmer is arrested in connection with a fatal hit-and-run accident that takes place on the night of the day of his wife’s funeral.  Hank thinks his mother’s death (she and his father were married fifty years) is causing the stern, self-righteous Joseph, a reformed alcoholic, to fall off the wagon.  In fact, the old man’s increasing égarement is an effect of the chemotherapy he’s been keeping quiet about.  Joseph goes on trial and Hank leads his defence.

    It’s not surprising that The Judge quickly fizzled out at the box office.  David Dobkin’s direction is no more imaginative than the story – why bother going to the cinema to see a movie-of-the-week that will soon turn up on TV anyway (even when the cameraman is Janusz Kaminski)?  The courtroom sequences in The Judge are, at least in their early stages, much superior to what British television viewers have been seeing the last few Monday nights, in the disappointing second series of Broadchurch, but things do get melodramatically ropy as the climax approaches.  Just as the prosecuting attorney (Billy Bob Thornton) gives up on trying to draw blood from Joseph and frustratedly confirms ‘No further questions’, the defendant clarifies his previous answer and the whole dynamic of the trial shifts.  The man killed in the hit-and-run, Mark Blackwell (Mark Kiely), had recently been released after serving twenty years for murder – a sentence handed down by Judge Palmer.  It emerges too that Blackwell was free to commit murder thanks to the very light penalty imposed by the Judge for an earlier crime.  Hank asks his father, in the witness box, to explain this uncharacteristic leniency.  The answer – helpful for anyone in the audience who needs reminding that Hank is Joseph’s son as well as his attorney – is that Blackwell’s plight reminded Judge Palmer of Hank as a troubled teenager.

    This is not much of a film but I found it oddly restful to watch.  The characters, although their predicaments are clichéd, are mostly well played.  In the smaller roles, Billy Bob Thornton is acute as the prosecutor and Vera Farmiga, who deserves better roles, emotionally fluid as the old girlfriend Hank left behind in Carlinville.  Ken Howard is good too, as the judge at the judge’s trial.  What praise there’s been for The Judge has centred on Robert Duvall’s performance as Joseph.  An ornery, unsmiling traditionalist – a ‘holier-than-thou prick’, as Hank describes his father – might seem to come too easily to Duvall.  He’s impressive, though, not least because you’re aware that it may not come many more times to an actor now in his eighty-fifth year.  (Perhaps Duvall doesn’t look quite his age but he looks older than the character is meant to be – Judge Palmer is in his early seventies.)   It’s Robert Downey Jr, however, who’s the best reason for seeing The Judge.  Downey doesn’t always connect much with other actors but his sardonic, self-absorbed quality works well here.  He could be expressing unease about giving himself to such obvious material but Downey’s wit and reticence leaven with wryness the predictable ironies of the story.  He suggests a troubled nature – a man who won’t get conflicts out of his system as neatly as the script seems to suggest.   The score isn’t anything special but, being by Thomas Newman, it’s very pleasant.

    24 February 2015

  • The Imposter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bart Layton (2012)

    There’s a scene in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley in which Tom Ripley, having murdered Dickie Greenleaf and assumed his victim’s identity (at least when it suits), has to present documentary proof of who he is.  His papers include Dickie’s passport, which still contains the dead man’s photograph.  No one is likely to mistake Matt Damon for Jude Law so on one level the acceptance of the credentials Tom passes through the guichet to an official is implausible.  The scene works, though, as a demonstration of mind over matter:  you believe that Tom convinces the customs man by an act of will.   Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter tells the story of how Nicholas Barclay, a thirteen-year-old who disappeared in San Antonio, Texas in 1994, turned up in Spain three years later – by which time the blue-eyed, blonde-haired teenager had metamorphosed into a young man with brown eyes and a French accent.   The new Nicholas, gratefully accepted by his family as the genuine article, was Frédéric Bourdin, twenty-three at the time and a serial imposter:  at this stage in his career Bourdin had pretended to be numerous missing teenagers and was wanted by Interpol.  I looked forward to seeing The Imposter to find out more about how Nicholas Barclay’s mother, brother, sister and brother-in-law were able to convince themselves (as I assumed they had convinced themselves) that Nicholas was who he claimed to be, in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary.  I wondered if this was another case, like the sequence in Mr Ripley, of wanting something enough to persuade yourself and others that it’s true.

    The Imposter turns out to be less interesting than it should be.   The core of the material Bart Layton has put together comprises interviews with Bourdin, with Nicholas Barclay’s surviving family and with professionals involved in the case – notably a policewoman and a private detective.  Layton supplements these with reconstructions of the scenes the interviewees describe.  For a while, I wondered if he was doing this to acknowledge and even emphasise the idea that – at this distance in time and in the light of theories that have grown up around the case – it’s impossible not only to know what happened to Nicholas Barclay but also for those principally affected by or involved in his disappearance and ‘reappearance’ to behave naturally or talk truthfully in the presence of a camera.   By the end of The Imposter, I was inclined to think there was a less sophisticated explanation for the reconstructions:   a lack of confidence on the director’s part that his talking heads were enough to sustain the film.  As it happens, none of these people is likeable.  A more serious problem is that all of them emit, to varying degrees, an awareness of being characters in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story.   If Frédéric Bourdin had any personal charm there would be some tension between that and the audience’s knowing they can’t believe a word he says and that he’s done shocking things; since he’s charmless, he’s tediously dislikeable.  Now married with three children of his own, Bourdin suggests here, and has said in other interviews, that his way of life is an expression of a search for affection and attention that he never received as a child.  Even if this is so, it’s such an obvious psychological explanation that you feel he’s making use of it because it’s plausible rather than because it’s true.

    Nicholas Barclay’s family may have other reasons for being less than honest with Layton.  Special Agent Nancy Fisher, who has a school prefect’s censoriousness, and the voluble private detective Charlie Parker are among those who think that the boy’s mother, the remarkably named Beverley Dollarhide (by some way the most compelling camera subject in The Imposter), and his now deceased elder brother Jason (who took a fatal drugs overdose), killed Nicholas and disposed of his body.  It came as a surprise to me when, two thirds of the way through, Layton’s focus switched to this possibility.  If you know anything about the case, however, it’s obvious the disappearance isn’t going to be solved or members of the family prosecuted.  (If this had actually happened it would obviously feature more in the promotion of the filn and what’s being written about it.)  The private detective is convinced he knows where the body is – in a corner of the back garden of the house where Nicholas lived at the time of his disappearance.  Parker gets excited as he approaches the property for the moment of truth:  it’s as if he wants the film to end the way that a fictional mystery would.  He gets the eager-to-help new owner of the place to start digging up his lawn but the man’s spadework reveals nothing more than a yawning hole in the ground.    At one point, Nicholas’s sister Carey reasonably asks why, if his family had done away with the boy, they would have reopened the case by welcoming Frédéric Bourdin into their lives.   You wonder why, if they have anything to hide, they agreed to be interviewed by Bart Layton.   But you wonder too if the answer is that they’ve grown so used to, even become dependent on, media interest this is now just the natural thing to do.

    30 August 2012

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