The Judge (2014)
Directed by David Dobkin
A successful lawyer returns to his hometown for his mother's funeral only to discover that his estranged father, the town's judge, is suspected of murder.
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Garden State and Grosse Pointe Blank, are just a couple that come to mind, but I suppose you could trace this plot all the way back to the biblical story of the prodigal son.
Taking a leaf of the Hotel Sorrento and Grosse Pointe Blank playbook, the film contrasts the lead character’s metropolitan hustle bustle — time is money, talk to the hand, ain’t got time for this — as a personality trait dramatically at odds with the atavistic values associated with their small-time origins.
You could say the same of Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning performance as Helen Hunt’s mean-spirited and homophobic neighbor 17 years ago in James L. Brooks’ “As Good as It Gets,” which feels like the unacknowledged modern template for all such stories.
Director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers, The Change-Up) lets the scene play without looking away, a rare portrayal of what we sometimes have to do for aging parents that Downey and Duvall perform beautifully with a mix of embarrassment, gratitude, and surprise.
It's too bad that director David Dobkin – who gave us the esteemed Wedding Crashers nearly a decade ago, but has since been responsible for films like Fred Claus – ignores more than one opportunity to bring this movie to an end, and instead stretches it out to a denouement in a fishing skiff on a sunlit lake that strongly, if not shamelessly, recalls a similar interlude in The Godfather: Part II, a picture in which Duvall, of course, memorably featured.
“The Judge” was directed by David Dobkin, whose best-known film is the comedy “Wedding Crashers,” so even in a serious vein, it’s consistently entertaining.
This doesn’t exactly sound like a laugh riot, but director David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”) wisely exploits some absurd yet recognizable situations for at least five or six good belly laughs during the film’s first hour.
Directed by David Dobkin, a man most known for his goofball comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” “The Change-Up” and “Fred Claus,” the film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.
But although the film works in part, as written by Nick Schenk ("Gran Torino") and Bill Dubuque and directed by David Dobkin ("Wedding Crashers," "The Change-Up") tackling his first drama, its many elements never quite come together.
Watching Downey patronize his family and condescend to the goober attorney (Dax Shepard) that Judge Joe initially hires, I had the same feeling I did seeing Tom Cruise swoop into town and outwit everybody in Jack Reacher — the locals are mostly portrayed as dim and parochial, even tough, lunar-lit Farmiga.
A flying visit home for Hank Palmer (Downey Jr.: Chef ) for the funeral of his mother turns into a longer stay when Dad (Duvall: Jack Reacher ) — “I wish he died instead of Mom” — is accused of a hit-and-run that killed a former felon whom everyone agrees was “the biggest mistake” of the judge’s career… and so The Judge is also a murder mystery with only one suspect, because both the elder Palmer’s respectability and the fact that something is clearly medically wrong with him — could it be incipient Alzheimer’s?