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