The Judge
(2014)
(SPOILERS) Robert Downey Jr.’s non-Iron Man, non-Sherlock Holmes
self-produced vanity project took a tumble at about this time last year. It
probably left a few studio suits scratching their heads. This was the star in
his cocky element (unlike Due Date),
playing off one of cinema’s great actors (Robert Duvall), playing in a reliable
genre staple (the courtroom drama). It isn’t so mystifying on actually watching
the thing. The Judge is bloated,
unfocused and manages to coddle the viewer with clichés while simultaneously
inserting material if thinks might be a little edgy (but really isn’t).
Actually, scratch that. I was genuinely surprised by the
scene in which Downey’s Hank Palmer must avoid slipping over in his ailing
father Joseph’s (Duvall) shit, and then proceeds to help him clean himself up.
This in a picture that is otherwise so shamelessly glossy and textbook in the
narrative points it hits.
Warner Bros must be thanking their lucky stars that David
Dobkin’s Arthur and Lancelot never
went into production. Dobkin’s fine as an anonymous comedy guy (well… he is
responsible for Fred Claus) but only
Downey Jr. knows why he was thought to have the chops for a serious drama. His
approach seems to be marbling the picture in Janusz Kaminski’s lush visuals (that
light flooding the courtroom though; sheesh!) and allowing Thomas Newman to
smother it with an emotionally tugging but banal score. Mostly the picture just
meanders, never able to gather steam on a course that is constantly checking
itself; is this a family saga, a romance, a murder mystery? There’s even a
smattering of ill-advised adult humour as Hank frets over whether the young
woman he copped off with when he got to town is in fact his daughter (it’s
okay, she’s only his niece! But he’s still not telling his ex).
I think I had in mind Downey Jr. attempting to do a proper
courtroom drama when I heard about the picture, à la The Verdict, but every element of Hank’s journey is tired and
familiar. He’s that heartless rich lawyer without a shred of moral fibre (“And how does it feel, Hank, knowing every
person you represent is guilty?”: “It’s
fine. Innocent people can’t afford me”), a guy who pisses on an opposing prosecuting
attorney’s shoes in the first scene, who is splitting up with his pert wife and
is estranged from his curmudgeonly father. Don’t worry, though. He adores his
daughter, so we know it will all work out fine in the end.
Just because material is familiar, doesn’t mean it can’t be
fruitful; the rich city guy returning to the small town of his birth and rediscovering
himself is evergreen in potential. It’s mostly squandered here, though. The
obligatory old flame, as personified by the wonderful but underused Vera
Farmiga, adds little to the proceedings other than expanding the running time
unnecessarily to the two-and-a-quarter hour mark (this is where the Downey
vanity vehicle bit comes in; it has to cater for any emotion he wishes to
explore herein, including showing his abs).
There’s the crafty prosecutor (Billy Bob Thornton, running
on autopilot, but who can blame him), the inexperienced defender (Dax Shepard,
decent but doing his well-meaning doofus shtick) and the brothers;
could’ve-been-a-ballplayer-if-not-for-Hank’s-dark-past (Vincent D’Onofrio,
doing the nice guy) and learning disabled filmmaker Hank stands rock solid by (Jeremy
Strong). The latter’s facility leads to overcooked nostalgia trip home movies.
The trial revolves around whether Joseph, on the night after
burying his wife, ran down and killed a man he regretted letting off lightly 20
years earlier (who subsequently got out of prison and killed his girlfriend).
None of the twists are sufficiently dramatic (it’s patently obvious Joseph
hasn’t started on the booze again, and is ill when he forgets someone’s name,
rather undermining Hank’s shit-hot credentials), and Nick Schenk and Bill
Dubuque’s screenplay even resorts to a big emotional bonding moment mid-trial
as Joseph reveals just how much he loved his wayward son despite it all.
The Judge lacks
balls. To paraphrase a question Hank asks his brothers, what line was Dobkin in
when they were distributing testicles? He’s content to imbue the movie with a
superficial veneer, only occasionally punctured by its stars, because that’s
the only kind of movie he seems comfortable making. This is a picture with so
little real inspiration, when it comes across a good line it has to put
quotation marks around it (“Everybody
wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in the bathtub”). Downey Jr.
is very much not stretching himself
here, but he’s reliable, and he’s more than up to playing a scene opposite
Duvall, who is the (only) real reason to see this.