Two great actors and one messy script
Print Edition
JUST put Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall in a room together and you’ll have a movie, a truism that “The Judge” does its damnedest to disprove.
David Dobkin’s film doesn’t leave a melodramatic stone unturned, adding to its courtroom drama a sentimental tsunami of story lines: a mother’s funeral, a father-son reckoning, a fight with cancer, a dash of alcoholism, a custody battle, a mentally challenged younger brother, and a hint of possible incest, to boot. Objection! Badgering the moviegoer.
But for a moment, the big-budget sheen of “The Judge” and its contrived, kitchen-sink emotionality is forgotten.
Downey’s big-city, high-priced lawyer, Hank Palmer, helps his ailing father, Duvall’s Judge Joseph Palmer, in an excrement-soiled bathroom, pulling him into the shower while they both struggle for an excuse to keep Hank’s young daughter outside.
Even with the scene’s gratuitous realism, it’s the one natural moment in the otherwise schematic “The Judge.” As it is, the considerable appeal of seeing such two fine actors — one a rigid old cowboy, the other a manic pinball — is limited by the film’s ceaseless heartstring-pulling.
Hank is a glib Chicago defense attorney who turns to his Indiana hometown for his mother’s funeral. Despite being a community pillar, Judge Palmer is arrested for running over and killing a man he once put in jail.
Hank defends him, along with a sheepish local lawyer (Dax Shepard) against a severe prosecutor (Billy Bob Thornton). The case is less the driver of the story than the frame for Hank’s return to his roots and bonding with his father.
Duvall is in his wheelhouse, playing a tough-talking, joke-dishing old man, but one haunted by regret and humbled by encroaching old age.
Downey, too, is in typical form, though he’s never much tested to go beyond his easy, hyper-verbal charm.
Seemingly anxious that in today’s cinema there’s no place for a simple courtroom drama or a coming-home tale, “The Judge” fuses the two together.
If “The Judge” proves anything, it’s that talented, likable actors can keep a mediocre movie humming.
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