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.

IMDb link

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