Find Me Guilty (2006)

Sidney Lumet spent a career in courtrooms, and Find Me Guilty finds him back in familiar chambers with a defendant who insists on representing himself. Vin Diesel plays Jackie DiNorscio, a New Jersey mobster folded into the longest racketeering trial in American history, and the film lifts its dialogue from the actual transcripts. The result is a talky, overlong, oddly endearing piece of work that arrived in 2006 to a shrug and a domestic gross of roughly one million dollars. Lumet, as ever, knew how to point a camera at a man talking.

Assessing the film's cultural temperature yields little heat. The cast is Italian-American almost to a person, which the story demands and nobody bothers to interrogate. Peter Dinklage turns up as a defense attorney, playing the role straight, and the film makes no remark upon it. Women appear in supporting capacities and are then dismissed by the narrative. Race, class, climate, and the body as a political site are absent entirely. What remains is a modest strain of sermonizing about loyalty and family, delivered from the witness stand, which the film treats as character instead of doctrine. Nobody here is being taught a lesson about the wider world.

Find Me Guilty reads as a relic of a pre-2015 sensibility, when a movie could concern mobsters and prosecutors and nothing else. It is not hostile to progressive values. It simply never considers them. The film's only agenda belongs to Jackie, and Jackie's agenda is Jackie. For a viewer cataloguing the era's moral commitments, the picture is a dry well, and a pleasant one. The verdict, in the end, is not guilty of the charges before us.