It's been several years since Robert Downey, Jr., seriously performed a serious character. His role in this makes up for all of it, and then some. The Judge is essentially a character study on a highly successful big-city lawyer whose personal life is disintegrating. When he returns to his childhood home to mourn his mother's passing, he becomes entrenched in a murder trial with his father as the prime suspect. Over the course of the film, he reconnects with his roots and heals his damaged relations with his family.
Robert Downey, Jr., proves to those of us who forgot that he can be a leading man. His roller coaster ride from guarded, impersonal urban workaholic to surprisingly vulnerable hometown man yearning for belonging. He has moments of his familiar, slippery humor, but he never sacrifices character or drama for it. More impressive to me is that he is a dramatic leading man in an almost entire cast of men. We don't see this very often, where a bunch of well-regarded male actors join together to create such an emotional movie about family, pride, respect, love, and reunion.
Robert Duvall plays Downey's father, the titular judge, with the gruff short-sightedness we've come to expect from him, but it effectively sets up his domestic problems the film goes on to explore. Unfortunately none of the supporting characters are given much of any dramatic arc, rather existing solely for our two leads to bounce off and develop against. More comic elements to the story are largely brought by Billy Bob Thornton, playing a dangerous prosecutor, and Dax Shepard, playing the town's up-and-coming defense attorney. Vincent D'Onofrio and Jeremy Strong play Downey's two brothers in heartwrenching portrayals of confusion, dependency, resentment, and eventually family. Several other fairly important names show up -- including Denis O'Hare, Leighton Meester, Sarah Lancaster -- but the big "third lead" as I consider her to be in this film is Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air (2009), Bates Motel), playing Downey's high school girlfriend. She is the only supporting role that has much dramatic arc, and most of it is because of the incredible work she's put into the character, not because the script allows much time for her.
It's not an original narrative, but director David Dobkin views most of it with an eye for wildly dramatic lighting and deliberate pacing. Especially engaging for me were the courtroom scenes, with such dark interior colors and stark contrast with garish light streaming through the windows. Dobkin allows for sentimentality in this picture, but he never totally gives in to it. His catches us by small surprise here and again with sharp comedy and brutal emotional revelation. Brutal, you ask? Oh yes. In one scene, Duvall falls and gets sick (presumably from his cancer treatment) and Downey helps clean him in the shower. And then, just when it's almost too much to watch, director Dobkin throws in some comedy in the form of Downey's daughter knocking on the bathroom door.
It's a charming, stylish family drama that partly takes place in a courtroom. Its familiarity and simple plot make it that much easier to project our own associations and emotional baggage onto it, and then receive a cathartic payoff before the end. Be prepared to smile, laugh, and then let the tears come.
IMDb: The Judge
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