The Judge (***1/4)

The Judge, a slick movie about a slick big-city lawyer and a cranky small-town judge accused of murder, isn’t groundbreaking or even particularly novel, but succeeds via competent execution. And who better to play this father-son pair than Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall? The Roberts seem to excel at taking these iconic male types and turning them into people.
 
The screenplay is almost too well-constructed. (One of the writers is Nick Schenk, previously credited on Gran Torino, another well-crafted story about a cranky get-off-of-my-lawn type old guy.) Like the way Downey’s character, Chicago criminal defense lawyer Hank Palmer, gets the call about his mother’s death at a dramatic moment in court. Or the way one of his two brothers has a penchant for making 8 mm home movies, all the better to supply real-time flashback scenes that fill in the backstory and help explain why Joseph Palmer, the father, is “dead to me,” as Hank explains to his precocious, almost too precocious, young
daughter. Or how, maximizing later dramatic impact, Hank has somehow managed not to find out a single thing that’s happened in the last 25 years to his high school girlfriend (Vera Farmiga), who, it happens, works at the local diner in Hank’s Indian hometown, and seems happy to see him.


The town, where almost all of the story takes place, is one of those nice movie small towns, not the run-down or dull-loooking kind often seen in rural America. But, to the good, the townspeople neither come off as petty and provincial nor as fonts of homespun wisdom. And the eventual trial, while featuring one of those witness-stand shockers that I suspect most trial lawyers and judges will hear only once or twice in a lifetime, has an outcome that makes sense. Most of all, while I wasn’t entirely persuaded that old Joseph was so difficult of a man that Hank would have avoided speaking to him for decades, their differences seemed real, as do the scenes explaining these differences, and his relationships with his brothers (Vincent D'Onofrio, Jeremy Strong).

The murder case, which involves a car accident that may or may not have been intentional, a lapse in memory (by Joseph) that may or may not be real, and some funny moments between Joseph’s two lawyers (Downey and Dax Shepard), is of medium-level interest, but the film is, maybe surprisingly, more than a courtroom drama. Again, possibly a little too perfect, but not false.

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viewed 10/15/14 7:30 pm at Roxy and posted 10/18/14

Conviction (***)

A movie’s appeal really shouldn’t depend on whether the story it tells really happened to someone, but it probably does help here to know that Betty Anne Waters really did decide to go to law school, not even having finished high school, just to get her brother Kenny out of jail. This is the sort of inspirational role that Hilary Swank seems to have made a specialty of, and having heard the real Betty Anne, I can say she nails both the rural Massachusetts accent and the sense of, yes, conviction that keeps Betty Anne moving forward.

Betty Anne and Kenny were part of a large, unstable family led by an undependable mother, and Kenny (Sam Rockwell) was prone to getting in fights, which is one reason attention was focused on him after a 1980 murder. Director Tony Goldwyn and writer Pamela Gray, who previously collaborated on 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, include brief but effective flashback scenes that provide a sense of the closeness that the two siblings developed. Rockwell’s few scenes show the actor’s range. There is suspense in the way Goldwyn shows us the testimony that convicted Kenny, and then shows how the jury was misled.

The underdog story seems so tailor-made for a movie that it seems almost too perfect. There is a murder, but not a mystery. The good and the evil are clear. Other stories of wrongful conviction often reveal a series of well-intentioned mistakes, cops and prosecutors trying their best but making errors and false assumptions. Here there is only the actions of one reckless cop, who is well played by Melissa Leo, but an unambiguous villain. And Betty is an unambiguous heroine. Therefore we have a well-told story, but without elements that would make the film truly great or surprising.

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viewed 9/28/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/16/10

Reservation Road (***1/4)

A divorced father (Mark Ruffalo) accidentally kills a child while driving home from a Red Sox game with his own son. His split-second decision to drive away from the crime propels this story of grief, guilt, and suspense, directed and cowritten by Hotel Rwanda’s Terry George. Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly play the parents of the dead boy.

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Michael Clayton (***3/4)

A canny legal thriller that is about ethics, not law, this stars George Clooney as the “fixer” of a high-powered New York firm. Once a rising star, he is now a problem solver. When one of the senior partners (Tom Wilkinson) goes haywire during a deposition, it’s Clayton who's tasked with calming him down and reassuring the client, a large chemical concern whose product seems to be making people sick. The case isn’t interesting as such; just as in many a legal thriller, there’s no doubt about where justice lies. The interest is with this character, who is the slick sort of person Clooney excels at playing, who is usually a heroic figure, but in this case is a divorced father who has fallen short of his aspirations, and whose debt forces him into hard choices.

Director Tony Gilroy, a successful screenwriter (the Bourne movies, Proof of Life) making his belated debut, contructs the movie intricately using a tight flashback structure. The story begins with a rant, an explosion, and a mass of activity in a large conference room where a large class action appears headed for a long-delayed settlement. (There are no courtroom scenes.) It’s all intentionally confusing, but Gilroy slowly brings the strands of the story together, returning to the same scenes in the end. The editing maintains the tension, often cutting to the next visual while the audio from the previous scene can still be heard. Besides Clooney and Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton also shines as the client's in-house attorney. Gilroy cuts back and forth between her pressing her dress down and rehearsing her lines like an actress, and her actually delivering them. He and Swinton humanize the sort of role that tends to be one-dimensional. All three of these characters realize face a similar ethical dilemma; each reacts differently. I could pretty much see where things were going to end up, but I was fascinated with the way Gilroy and Clooney take us there. This is a superior suspense drama.

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reviewed 10/9/07

Fracture (***1/2)

? Anthony Hopkins has apparently killed his cheating wife and confessed, making a seemingly easy final case for prosecutor Ryan Gosling, who’s resigned to take a job at a ritzy law firm.
+ The mystery here, a missing bit of evidence, is a canny invention that by itself practically makes the movie worth watching. But what really makes things interesting while that unravels is the prosecutor, whose desire for justice is conflated with a desire to display his competence, and whose pride and sense of ethics conflict with his ambition. Between the sharp screenplay (by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers) and Gosling’s nuanced portrayal, what could have been a corny potboiler about a lawyer choosing between money and public service is rendered with subtlety. The villain is a simpler character; Hopkins differentiates him from his Hannibal Lecter by playing him as deceptively mild-mannered.
- The movie telegraphs its surprise ending a few minutes earlier than necessary. It’s a pretty good twist, but probably one that the characters should have figured out before they apparently do.
= ***1/2 Smart and suspenseful; recommended.

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reviewed 4/27/07

Daddy’s Little Girls (**3/4)

? Tyler Perry (Madea’s Family Reunion) wrote and directed (but doesn’t star in) this, his third movie as a writer, second as a director, and first not to feature his outrageous Madea character. Instead, he strays closer to romantic comedy territory with a tale of a working-class single dad (Idris Elba) facing a custody battle. Grudgingly taking a job as a limo driver, he finds not Miss Daisy but Gabrielle Union, a snooty yet unmistakably attractive lawyer whose friends keep setting her up with lousy blind dates.
+ Notwithstanding that just about all of the characters are familiar types, everyone’s pretty likeable here, and the leads are obvious eye candy. Perry’s direction seems to have improved from Madea’s Family Reunion, which seemed too much like a comedy and a melodrama side by side. Here, the comedy is well integrated into the story.
- The one thing you could say about the Madea character, caricature though she may have been, is that she was a mixture of good and bad, but everyone in this movie is one or the other (although it’s true that the lawyer must shed her haughtiness). The mother in the custody battle, whose new boyfriend is a drug dealer, is almost absurdly unsympathetic. Watching both this and Family Reunion I sometimes got the feeling that I was watching a morality play about how black people ought to behave as much as a story about characters. (Other than a judge, there are no significant characters who aren’t black.) One thing they shouldn’t do, the movie implies, is date outside the race. Although perhaps the lawyer’s stated preference is only physical, in having her mention it twice the movie seemed to go beyond celebrating self-sufficiency to advocating self-segregation. Finally, can you guess the whole plot from the description? Pretty much.
= **3/4 Perry’s not exactly August Wilson, but he has storytelling gifts that will serve him well if he tries something with a bit more moral complexity.

IMDB link

reviewed 2/16/07

The Shaggy Dog (**1/2)

This recycled Disney movie features Tim Allen as the assistant D.A. whose career path is interrupted by his sudden transformation into a sheepdog. Too much family stuff, not enough comic transformations.

This is what I call a gimmick movie. Ideally, the gimmick movie should a) follow the logic of the gimmick and b) exploit the gimmick to its fullest. (Shallow Hal fails the first test, for example, because Hal inexplicably only sees some people’s inner beauty.) The gimmick here, borrowed from its 1959 namesake, is that Tim Allen sometimes turns into a sheepdog. The actual plot more resembles The Shaggy D.A., the 1976 sequel. In those movies, a magic ring causes the ado; the script here (credited to five writers) tries to relate it to DNA. Yet this only highlights that Allen’s transformations don’t have much logic, thus failing the first test. (It’s either sloppiness or a sequel setup that at the end, he’s still, as far as I could tell, not cured.) Kids probably won’t notice this, but Shaggy Dog only gets about a “C+” on the other test. Too much plot time is tied up with the evil doings of the DNA scientists, including Robert Downey Jr., playing a witness in the case Allen is trying. Apparently there’s also a rule that if you remake an old family film (see also Yours, Mine, and Ours and Cheaper by the Dozen) you have to add in a subplot about Dad’s work interfering with his home life. Can someone declare this plot officially tired? On the other hand, I think Tim Allen’s starting to grow on me. Unlike with Steve Martin, I never feel like he should be doing something better.

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posted 9/9/13

The Ice Harvest (***)

A subdued film noir (with mild comedy elements and good dialogue) starring John Cusack as a Wichita mob lawyer who steals a couple of million from his employer.

John Cusack stars in this downbeat Christmas tale, which probably won’t linger in theaters until the holiday. He, an attorney, and Billy Bob Thornton have just swiped a couple of million dollars from the local mob in Wichita, Kansas. (Even if the movie does take its setting from the Scott Phillips novel on which it’s based, and even if it makes it look it like a small town consisting largely of strip joints rather than a city of 300,000 people, I have to give an extra quarter of a star just based on this novelty.) The director is Harold Ramis of Caddyshack, Ghost Busters, and Groundhog Day fame, but this isn’t much like those, or like Thornton’s other Christmas cheer-down, Bad Santa. In fact, it has the feel of the last movie on which writers Richard Russo and Robert Benton collaborated, Twilight with Paul Newman. It’s a subdued, old-fashioned film noir, complete with a femme fatale (Connie Nielsen). It’s probably boring if you’re looking for much action or even scenery, and the story elements are familiar, at least if you’ve seen some old detective films, but it does have well-written dialogue, suspense and some humor. Oliver Platt is amusing as Cusack’s drunken friend, who tells anyone in earshot that he’s pals with a mob lawyer (i.e. Cusack), though Thornton has movie’s only real laugh-aloud line.

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circulated via email 12/15/05 and posted online 9/20/13