The Judge (2014)

The Judge arrives with the gravity of a film convinced it is saying something profound about fathers and sons. It says something familiar instead. A hotshot Chicago attorney returns to small-town Indiana for his mother's funeral and stays to defend his estranged father, the local judge, against a murder charge. The next two and a half hours consist of men negotiating grievances in rooms. Courtrooms, kitchens, hospital corridors, the deck of a fishing boat. Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. are very good at it, which is the entire engine of the picture.

The ensemble is white, the town is white, and nobody involved appears to have noticed or cared. That is not a failing of the film so much as a description of it. The women orbit Hank like moons: Sam runs the diner and carries an old flame, Carla studies law and may or may not be his daughter, Lauren is the daughter he actually has. None of them advances an argument about gender, and none of them is asked to. Dale, the younger brother, is intellectually disabled and makes amateur films, and the movie grants him a mild dignity without ever treating his condition as a subject worth examining. He is texture. The wealthy guilty clients Hank defends in Chicago function as evidence of his moral drift, not as an indictment of anything larger.

The film does enjoy a good speech. Closing arguments, hospital confrontations, a cross-examination that dismantles its own defense, all delivered at volume. The sermons, such as they are, concern forgiveness within a family. Nobody stands up to lecture the audience about the wider world, and the movie has no interest in doing so. This is a piece of studio craftsmanship from 2014, competently assembled and culturally inert, a film about a man learning to love his father before the credits roll. We have seen it before. We will see it again.