Butler's Cinema Scene

The Judge” has a few good things going for it, particularly the promise of a high-octane acting duel between Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr.

What the film doesn’t have is faith that the audience can appreciate solid dramatic acting for more than, oh, three minutes at a stretch.

In this story of an estranged father and son thrown together by a big trial, every  scene that carries a bit of weight immediately goes for a comic coda — often a cheap comic coda. The effect is weirdly mechanical. But we can’t leave the paying customers thinking serious thoughts, right?

The result is an overlong, overstuffed movie at war with itself.Hank Palmer (Downey) is a top Chicago trial lawyer. A maddening mix of intelligence and arrogance, Hank knows how to bend the law to his will. He is not apologetic about this.“Everybody wants Atticus Finch,” he notes, “until there’s a dead hooker in the hot tub.”

It’s a case of perfect casting. Nobody tops Downey in portraying smarmy characters who undergo a redemptive transformation (see “Iron Man”).

The death of Hank’s mother brings him back to the small Indiana town he fled 20 years earlier. Though this idyllic burg seems to have fallen out of a Norman Rockwell painting, Hank  hates the place.

More accurately, he hates his old man, Judge Palmer (Duvall). The two haven’t spoken since forever, and the Judge has never met Hank’s young daughter.

Why these two are always at each other’s throats will be revealed in dribs and drabs over the next two hours.

The Judge is charged with manslaughter in the death by automobile of an ex-con with whom he has had a troubled past.

Being a monstrous egoist, Hank sticks around to represent his father — especially since the Judge’s local attorney (Dax Shepard) is borderline inept. The poor jerk upchucks on the courthouse steps every time he must face Billy Bob Thornton’s steely-eyed prosecutor.

Screenwriters Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque populate the tale with plenty of peripheral characters and so many narrative sidebars that you wonder if they’ve saved any ideas at all for future movies.

Vincent D’Onofrio is Hank’s big brother, a once-promising athlete whose baseball career ended in a car wreck with Hank behind the wheel.

The youngest Palmer sibling (Jeremy Strong) is a mentally-challenged home movie enthusiast who recuts the family’s old 8mm films — thus providing the audience with grainy flashbacks of the boys’ early life. He’s an innocent child-man whose job is to say something funny/cute whenever the dialogue threatens to get too serious.

As you already may have ascertained, he’s not a real person. He’s a convenient plot device.

Thank heavens for Vera Farmiga as Hank’s old high school squeeze. Farmiga steals her scenes as a small-town flirt who also is an accomplished businesswoman — a nifty blend of bawdy and brainy. Oh, and she has a daughter who was conceived about the same time Hank left town for good.  You do the math.

“The Judge” throws off so many plot twists and mood swings (Fatal illness, anyone? How about the most horrific depiction ever of chemo side effects?) that director David Dobkin struggles to keep it all in balance.

But then this is Dobkin’s first attempt at something even halfway serious (his previous efforts include “Wedding Crashers” and “Shanghai Knights”), which may explain why he’s always so eager to fall back on a comforting yuk.

It’s a shame, really, because Downey and Duvall do deliver the promised thespian showdown — though the filmmakers still insist on gilding the lily by staging one major confrontation against the background of a tornadic storm. Apparently one of the writers has read “King Lear.”

Every time you’re ready to write off “The Judge,” these two great actors pull you back in. They’re so much better than their material or their director.

| Robert W. Butler