The two Roberts, Duvall and Downey, Jr., make a great antagonistic father-son team in The Judge. They are supported with a sensitive performance by Vincent D’Onofrio as the half-disgruntled other son. But half-disgruntled is a symptom of the film’s problems. Written and rewritten by too many hands, The Judge is too long, too unsteady in tone and with too many clichés packed into a promising story about how high-flying Chicago attorney Hank Palmer (Downey), home in small-town Indiana for his mother’s funeral, ends up defending his surly father, Judge Joseph Palmer (Duvall), in a murder trial.
Comedy, drama or—in ugly film critic speak—dramedy? Downey gives Hank a glib tongue that sustains some of the comedy, playing an attorney infamous for getting wealthy miscreants off the hook (“Innocent people can’t afford me”). As his marriage disintegrates from his workaholic ways, he is summoned home to corn country for the first time since high school. Unresolved family problems await, including the injury that deprived his half-disgruntled brother of his chance to escape, and their demanding father, addressed by his children not as dad but as “Judge.”
Judge Palmer is a jurist of blunt rectitude, rigid and cold as a rusty iron fencepost in winter. Although a loving husband (and crushed by the death of his wife), he seems to have presided over his family as if they were suspects on the dock—except when he was just the opposite. Contradiction and paradox are keys to human nature, yet the screenplay never unlocks Judge Palmer—merely, it shows incidents.
Duvall is superb in the role, crafting a memorable character from the mess he was handed: proud, stubborn, abusive and (as hinted in an early scene) inching toward senescence. When he runs over an ex-con on the rainy night of his wife’s funeral, he stands accused in his own courtroom of murder. Billy Bob Thornton plays the suave prosecutor.
The courtroom drama and the knotty Arthur Milleresque relations between father and son provide many of The Judge’s best moments. Alas, the story is larded with enough schmaltz (the girl who still waits for Hank 25 years later and the daughter who might be his) to keep a daytime soap opera running for months. The movie confronts the harsh reality of elder cognitive decline, but also wants to be a four-handkerchief weepie. It comes to a natural, elegiac ending—but goes on and on for many more minutes like a jabber-jaws that won’t shut up.
