David Dobkin’s ‘The Judge’

Duvall’s Joseph Palmer is a crotchety judge in rural Indiana who once cut a youthful offender some slack he wouldn’t give his own son and lived to regret it. Said son, Hank (Robert Downey Jr.), is now a successful defense lawyer in Chicago who likes to brag — it’s the film’s best line — that “innocent people can’t afford me.” Thus judicial rectitude is repaid by a cut-every-corner wise guy who likes to game the system to get corporate sleazebags off. Hank has a bad attitude; when a young prosecutor interrupts him at the urinal, he turns his stream on him. Good way to introduce a hero.

As Hank’s latest trial opens — the prosecutor’s suit is still wet — he gets a phone call informing him that his mother has died. It’s a ploy the film will repeat, milking the dramatic effect of each plot turn. Hank goes home to the small town he despised and the father and two brothers he hasn’t seen since leaving for the big city. Actually, the town looks pretty upscale for rural Indiana, perhaps because the exterior location was actually in Massachusetts. Hank sneers nonetheless, but he does reconnect to a degree with his siblings, older brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio), whose promising baseball career was cut short by an auto accident in which Hank was the driver, and younger brother Dale (Jeremy Strong), who’s sweet but not too swift, at home only with a camera.

Mutual resentments

Does the judge resent Hank for ruining Glen’s future? We are led to think so indirectly, but it’s one of the loose ends of the plot. Perhaps the two are just too much alike under the skin, but the judge straight-arms Hank, who leaves as soon (and as furiously) as he decently can, only to be yanked back, this time off a plane, when the judge is arrested for having run over and killed the same offender he’d once pardoned. The judge claims to have no recollection of the incident, but the circumstantial evidence is pretty damning. He needs a good lawyer, who would obviously both be and not be Hank, but to preempt any assistance from his son he engages a local boob who throws up outside the courthouse steps every time he approaches them and has exactly one criminal case under his belt (which he’d lost, of course).

Evidently, the judge wants judging, but it is exactly that fact that now ties Hank to him — he can’t leave the old man to the fate he obviously desires, just because he desires it. Naturally, Hank shouldn’t handle the case for a thousand good reasons, but, this being Hollywood, of course he takes it over. The question is whether the judge will let Hank get him off, for we can’t doubt he will if given half a chance. This will require the judge forgiving him for whatever it is that’s between them, but also forgiving himself for what happened on the road. Rectitude is a fine quality in a judge, but it can be a fatal one in a parent. When the two roles coincide in the same man, it’s a high old mess. The judge decides to split the difference.

Fathers and sons have been having it out ever since Laius and Oedipus, and you know how that story turned out. What happens in The Judge is more akin to On Golden Pond, but much less convincing. We can believe a Hank who comes to realize that he has permission at last to do something else with his life besides spiting his father by defending the guilty rich. We can’t believe that he will embrace everything he’s spent his whole life running away from in the bargain, but that appears to be the takeaway of the film. Hank’s credibility depends in large part on his willingness to remain a bastard. The last thing we can expect of him — a sentimental fling with an ex-girlfriend and a visit to his father’s chambers aside — is that he will become a rube.

The film’s best moments come when the sparks fly between Downey and Duvall as their characters’ conflict comes into the open. These are two actors who can bring it, and Duvall in particular is superb as a man for whom integrity is a religion that does not admit the possibility of sin. That Hank and the judge will have to bend a bit toward each other is a given of the plot’s premise, but the distance between them also needs to remain. Hollywood doesn’t really sell in Indiana.