This one really isn't to be missed, certainly among the best of the courtroom dramas.
The acting. Well, first of all, nobody is bad. The most nearly negligible performance is by Wesley Addy, who at least looks the part of the elegant doctor and who is a competent actor. The other principals are outstanding. Charlotte Rampling with that odd face -- sultriness imposed kicking and screaming upon boniness -- is unusually good and even manages to project a kind of believable guilty remorse, which has never been her strong suit. James Mason is (almost)unflappable as Concannon, attorney for the defense. Marvelous, the way he puts quotation marks around the word "expert" while questioning the plaintiff's witness. Edward Binns is stolid as the savvy but moral bishop who wants to wrap things up without making waves. "What is the truth?", he asks Newman. Jack Warden is plumply likable, as always. He's seems to have aged more than Binns, with whom he'd worked a quarter of a century earlier in "Twelve Angry Men." Lindsay Crouse in a small but crucial role is appealingly Irish. Milo O'Shea is sliminess itself. I don't know why, perhaps his impish accent, but there is always something amusing about him, as if unable to quite shake what Erving Goffman called "role distance," the knowledge that he's playing a part accompanied by an awareness of the absurdity of doing so.
Even Bruce Willis is in this, playing a visitor to the courtroom. I was an atmosphere person in a Boston courtroom too, in "From the Hip" -- a far superior movie. (Ask anybody. Ask my mother.)
And Paul Newman is flawless. Robert Redford was supposed to play Frankie Galvin, but he wouldn't have been up to the part. The role requires the compelling anguish that Newman brings to it, and he does it perfectly. Redford is much too cool for that. I will mention just one scene of Newman's that is emblematic. He stands in his darkened office -- Warden watching soundlessly from the background -- and calls the defendants' law firm about a settlement they have already withdrawn. He paces around talking into the phone, hardly able to breathe, congested with not just mucous but self hatred, cajoling them, pounding on the desk with his knuckles, filled with an empty bravado. Redford couldn't do it. Practically nobody could do it.
Almost everything fits together perfectly in this film. Sidney Lumet opens with a shot of Newman alone in silhouette playing a pinball machine in a Boston bar, drinking beer. The pinball game serves as a token for the trajectory of his life during the course of the film. Wardrobe: first-rate. How "New England." Multi-layered dark clothing, (in Newman's case black), woolly and fussy. Sound: excellent. Little noises, hardly noticeable, form almost a background score. The old wooden floors creak when people step on them. An example of one or two good creaks: the scene in Concannon's office when he is welcoming Laura back to the law. Twirled-up telephone lines squeak when someone pulls on them. The tinkling of ice cubes in liquor glasses. The heavy breathing of nervous or defeated people. The slamming of ancient desk drawers. Garbage trucks groaning and whining in the city streets at dawn.
Production design: as good as it gets. Everything looks old, as if it has been used and lived in for years, not shabby but burnished with age, all mahogany wood and scarlet carpets. Lighting and photography: up there with the best. Most scenes are dark -- it's midwinter in Boston -- but not too dark, cleverly lighted. The snow in the streets is literally blue, as if it had just leaped out of an impressionist landscape. Tree branches glisten with moisture on slick night-time streets. Tinsel draped along a bar ceiling twinkles with fraudulent joy.
The weakness? The movie is so good I hate to mention it, but the script leaves something to be desired. It almost betrays the characters. I don't mind the legal absurdities so much. Okay, so things would never really happen this way. The judge would have to grant a continuance and so forth. It's not so much that as the motivation and the set speeches that are bothersome, especially Newman's, and they're critical. The banter and small talk are fine.
But Newman's conversion from a drunken, cynical ambulance chaser to a principled attorney of reawakened morals in the course of two-minute photo session with a comatose patient is patently unbelievable. Where did all that conscience (if that's what it is?) suddenly come from? He flops backwards as if stunned. Why? The script does its best to back up his epiphany. The images of his patient develop as a real person, not just a dollar sign, on the Polaroid photos, a mirror image of what's going on in his mind.
But as Warden repeatedly points out, his job is to win some money for his clients so they can leave their comatose sister in good care and get on with their lives in Tucson. Instead he turns down the church's offer because he sees a trial as a challenge to his personal pride, as a "means of redemption". (Is that kind of pride a mortal or a venial sin?) He loses sight of what the whole legal process is about because of this self-involvement. It wouldn't be so bad if he realized this but in fact he never gives it a thought.
Finally, Newman's summation: it sounds as if it had been put together by some high school kid whose homework assignment was to write an essay (of at least two hundred words) about "what life means to me." "I believe there is justice in our hearts," says Newman, more to himself than to the jury. No kidding.
None of this criticism can subtract from all the other virtues of the film. It's among the best of its kind.
The acting. Well, first of all, nobody is bad. The most nearly negligible performance is by Wesley Addy, who at least looks the part of the elegant doctor and who is a competent actor. The other principals are outstanding. Charlotte Rampling with that odd face -- sultriness imposed kicking and screaming upon boniness -- is unusually good and even manages to project a kind of believable guilty remorse, which has never been her strong suit. James Mason is (almost)unflappable as Concannon, attorney for the defense. Marvelous, the way he puts quotation marks around the word "expert" while questioning the plaintiff's witness. Edward Binns is stolid as the savvy but moral bishop who wants to wrap things up without making waves. "What is the truth?", he asks Newman. Jack Warden is plumply likable, as always. He's seems to have aged more than Binns, with whom he'd worked a quarter of a century earlier in "Twelve Angry Men." Lindsay Crouse in a small but crucial role is appealingly Irish. Milo O'Shea is sliminess itself. I don't know why, perhaps his impish accent, but there is always something amusing about him, as if unable to quite shake what Erving Goffman called "role distance," the knowledge that he's playing a part accompanied by an awareness of the absurdity of doing so.
Even Bruce Willis is in this, playing a visitor to the courtroom. I was an atmosphere person in a Boston courtroom too, in "From the Hip" -- a far superior movie. (Ask anybody. Ask my mother.)
And Paul Newman is flawless. Robert Redford was supposed to play Frankie Galvin, but he wouldn't have been up to the part. The role requires the compelling anguish that Newman brings to it, and he does it perfectly. Redford is much too cool for that. I will mention just one scene of Newman's that is emblematic. He stands in his darkened office -- Warden watching soundlessly from the background -- and calls the defendants' law firm about a settlement they have already withdrawn. He paces around talking into the phone, hardly able to breathe, congested with not just mucous but self hatred, cajoling them, pounding on the desk with his knuckles, filled with an empty bravado. Redford couldn't do it. Practically nobody could do it.
Almost everything fits together perfectly in this film. Sidney Lumet opens with a shot of Newman alone in silhouette playing a pinball machine in a Boston bar, drinking beer. The pinball game serves as a token for the trajectory of his life during the course of the film. Wardrobe: first-rate. How "New England." Multi-layered dark clothing, (in Newman's case black), woolly and fussy. Sound: excellent. Little noises, hardly noticeable, form almost a background score. The old wooden floors creak when people step on them. An example of one or two good creaks: the scene in Concannon's office when he is welcoming Laura back to the law. Twirled-up telephone lines squeak when someone pulls on them. The tinkling of ice cubes in liquor glasses. The heavy breathing of nervous or defeated people. The slamming of ancient desk drawers. Garbage trucks groaning and whining in the city streets at dawn.
Production design: as good as it gets. Everything looks old, as if it has been used and lived in for years, not shabby but burnished with age, all mahogany wood and scarlet carpets. Lighting and photography: up there with the best. Most scenes are dark -- it's midwinter in Boston -- but not too dark, cleverly lighted. The snow in the streets is literally blue, as if it had just leaped out of an impressionist landscape. Tree branches glisten with moisture on slick night-time streets. Tinsel draped along a bar ceiling twinkles with fraudulent joy.
The weakness? The movie is so good I hate to mention it, but the script leaves something to be desired. It almost betrays the characters. I don't mind the legal absurdities so much. Okay, so things would never really happen this way. The judge would have to grant a continuance and so forth. It's not so much that as the motivation and the set speeches that are bothersome, especially Newman's, and they're critical. The banter and small talk are fine.
But Newman's conversion from a drunken, cynical ambulance chaser to a principled attorney of reawakened morals in the course of two-minute photo session with a comatose patient is patently unbelievable. Where did all that conscience (if that's what it is?) suddenly come from? He flops backwards as if stunned. Why? The script does its best to back up his epiphany. The images of his patient develop as a real person, not just a dollar sign, on the Polaroid photos, a mirror image of what's going on in his mind.
But as Warden repeatedly points out, his job is to win some money for his clients so they can leave their comatose sister in good care and get on with their lives in Tucson. Instead he turns down the church's offer because he sees a trial as a challenge to his personal pride, as a "means of redemption". (Is that kind of pride a mortal or a venial sin?) He loses sight of what the whole legal process is about because of this self-involvement. It wouldn't be so bad if he realized this but in fact he never gives it a thought.
Finally, Newman's summation: it sounds as if it had been put together by some high school kid whose homework assignment was to write an essay (of at least two hundred words) about "what life means to me." "I believe there is justice in our hearts," says Newman, more to himself than to the jury. No kidding.
None of this criticism can subtract from all the other virtues of the film. It's among the best of its kind.