![[Film review] The American family goes on trial in 'The Judge'](https://sc0.blr1.digitaloceanspaces.com/large/683152-467a0d94-fc02-47a2-b64d-6208d3427bd2.jpg)
One of Robert Duvall’s best regarded roles is of Tom Hagen, the mob lawyer in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather 2 with greater loyalty to the Mafia than to the American legal system. In his most recent performance, the 83-year-old actor appears as an Indiana judge whose ideas about crime and punishment have estranged one son and beaten two others into submission.
Duvall is 83 and frail, and his hair, scanty even when he made his debut as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, curls like a duck’s tail at the base of his head. The part was supposed to have gone to Jack Nicholson, but the mix of exterior vulnerability and interior steel is entirely Duvall’s.
The estranged son is a mirror image of his father, although both will go to their graves before they admit it. Henry (Robert Downey Jr) is more shyster than lawyer, raking in the greenbacks for his private law firm and in the middle of an ugly divorce. News of his mother’s death brings him to the home he fled as a young man. The territory is familiar – small-town America whose prosperity hides unpleasant secrets, a forced family reunion that nobody seems to want, the discomfort of the son who got away, frayed ties that need mending.
Guilt in and outside the courtroom
Part-family dissection and part-legal drama, The Judge is director David Dobkin’s contribution to the Men’s Weepie, a category that includes The Place Beyond the Pines, Warriors, Mud, Blue Valentine, and other such explorations of damaged American manhood. It’s beautifully written by Nic Schenk and Bill Dubuque, who have an ear for sharp conversation and the cruel things that only family members can say to one another. Judge Palmer’s relations with Henry are so brittle that the old man prefers to hire a local greenhorn rather than his skilled son. Henry eventually takes over the case, pits his brilliant brain against Billy Bob Thorton’s public prosecutor, but only after Palmer and Henry have had a go at each other.
“I wish I liked you more,” the judge tells Henry. “I wish he had died instead of mom,” says the son to his horrified siblings (Vincent D’Onofrio and Dax Shephard).
There is ample guilt inside and outside the courtroom in The Judge, and death, both recent and around the corner, punctuate the encounters between the rebellious Henry and his authoritarian father. The old man does eventually let his guard down, leading to an emotionally powerful sequence in which Henry finally gets a measure of his father’s extensive physical decay. It’s a bold, unblinking moment, usually seen in arthouse films like Amour and A Separation than in a mainstream Hollywood picture, and it helps offset the sentimentality that creeps in later in the movie.
Too much going on at once
At 141 minutes, The Judge cannot avoid resorting to clichés, and they pile up as the movie trundles on. The sub-plot between Henry and his ex-flame, played by the effervescent Vera Farmiga, gives Downey Jr a chance to display his roguish charm and aptitude for playing troubled, restless characters. But it barely works, just like the resolution between D’Onofrio’s character Glen, whose promising career was sabotaged by Henry’s teenage antics, feels false.
The Judge is animated by the sentiment behind Philip Larkin’s 1971poem This Be the Verse, in which he observed that “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do” – but it rewrites the ending. The movie is beautifully acted, and deeply committed to teasing out the tensions that lie at the heart of modern families, but another American film, Alexander Payne’s acerbic Nebraska, went over similar ground with greater economy. The Judge’s tearful ending seems tacked on, while Nebraska’s closing shot suggests that while one domestic battle has been won, the war will never end.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Duvall is 83 and frail, and his hair, scanty even when he made his debut as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, curls like a duck’s tail at the base of his head. The part was supposed to have gone to Jack Nicholson, but the mix of exterior vulnerability and interior steel is entirely Duvall’s.
The estranged son is a mirror image of his father, although both will go to their graves before they admit it. Henry (Robert Downey Jr) is more shyster than lawyer, raking in the greenbacks for his private law firm and in the middle of an ugly divorce. News of his mother’s death brings him to the home he fled as a young man. The territory is familiar – small-town America whose prosperity hides unpleasant secrets, a forced family reunion that nobody seems to want, the discomfort of the son who got away, frayed ties that need mending.
Guilt in and outside the courtroom
Part-family dissection and part-legal drama, The Judge is director David Dobkin’s contribution to the Men’s Weepie, a category that includes The Place Beyond the Pines, Warriors, Mud, Blue Valentine, and other such explorations of damaged American manhood. It’s beautifully written by Nic Schenk and Bill Dubuque, who have an ear for sharp conversation and the cruel things that only family members can say to one another. Judge Palmer’s relations with Henry are so brittle that the old man prefers to hire a local greenhorn rather than his skilled son. Henry eventually takes over the case, pits his brilliant brain against Billy Bob Thorton’s public prosecutor, but only after Palmer and Henry have had a go at each other.
“I wish I liked you more,” the judge tells Henry. “I wish he had died instead of mom,” says the son to his horrified siblings (Vincent D’Onofrio and Dax Shephard).
There is ample guilt inside and outside the courtroom in The Judge, and death, both recent and around the corner, punctuate the encounters between the rebellious Henry and his authoritarian father. The old man does eventually let his guard down, leading to an emotionally powerful sequence in which Henry finally gets a measure of his father’s extensive physical decay. It’s a bold, unblinking moment, usually seen in arthouse films like Amour and A Separation than in a mainstream Hollywood picture, and it helps offset the sentimentality that creeps in later in the movie.
Too much going on at once
At 141 minutes, The Judge cannot avoid resorting to clichés, and they pile up as the movie trundles on. The sub-plot between Henry and his ex-flame, played by the effervescent Vera Farmiga, gives Downey Jr a chance to display his roguish charm and aptitude for playing troubled, restless characters. But it barely works, just like the resolution between D’Onofrio’s character Glen, whose promising career was sabotaged by Henry’s teenage antics, feels false.
The Judge is animated by the sentiment behind Philip Larkin’s 1971poem This Be the Verse, in which he observed that “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do” – but it rewrites the ending. The movie is beautifully acted, and deeply committed to teasing out the tensions that lie at the heart of modern families, but another American film, Alexander Payne’s acerbic Nebraska, went over similar ground with greater economy. The Judge’s tearful ending seems tacked on, while Nebraska’s closing shot suggests that while one domestic battle has been won, the war will never end.