I’m hard-pressed to think of a courtroom drama that doesn’t drum up the kind of intensity engineered to temporarily hypnotize you into believing the quest for justice driving it is the most important cause in the world. The intensity in The Verdict (1982) reverberates even more because its quest for justice, if everything goes right, doubles as a type of salvation for its lawyer protagonist (Paul Newman). We first meet Frank Galvin on a cold afternoon, passing the time with a game of pinball and a pint of beer, and we will soon understand that this is the highlight of his day and many previous and subsequent ones. Frank used to be a pretty successful lawyer, but he’s tumbled into the sort of soul-crushing hard times from which it’s hard to climb out. He’s been through a messy divorce, fired unfairly from his firm, and now soothes his sorrows over both with lots and lots of booze. His career is now confined to cynical ambulance chasing (he sniffs around funerals in case the person being mourned over died unjustly); the people who care for him are limited to Mickey (a wonderful Jack Warden), a former partner who’s the kind of no-questions-asked friend who’ll see Frank’s office a mess after a hard night of drinking and do some of the clean-up for him.
Mickey is also the kind of friend who will throw professional bones at Frank if he happens to have any spares. Early in The Verdict, he has one he’s sure Frank will be able to handle. It’s pretty straightforward — a medical malpractice case that can all but be guaranteed to be settled out of court for a handsome amount with which the victim’s family would be more than happy. Frank, at first, is just fine approaching it with that attitude. But then he sees the victim — a young woman who allegedly was given the wrong anesthetic during childbirth, choked on her own vomit, and now lies comatose — and decides, without consulting the woman’s litigious sister and brother-in-law, that a settlement simply won’t do. Justice must be served. In their by-turns cozy and austerely snowy Boston enclave, the doctors and the hospital where they work are venerated with unstained, near-godly esteem. Them getting away with it not just recasts the victim’s death as not mattering but also lets a powerful institution retain its absolute power. This presumably is the first case in years for which Frank truly feels inspirited to find a meaningful resolution.
There’s all that plus the fact that Frank, deep down, wants to parlay this public display into both a bolstering to his image as a hopeless, reckless has-been and a way to prove to himself that he still has it — that his best days are not, in fact, behind him. Newman’s roles until The Verdict were hardly one-note, but performances like the one here — anxious, shaky, unself-confident, almost tangibly fragile — were in far shorter supply. It’s amazing how comprehensively Newman disappears into this ostensibly once-great man struggling to escape from the shell of torment that has for so long encased him that the person he was without it feels like someone separate entirely.
Newman’s freakish handsomeness, now a little worn, still works like a built-in visual assurance that he’ll eventually get to the greatness he’s looking to again embody. This is one of his few roles that makes you somewhat lose the starry eyes you get when you see him, though the he’s Paul Newman of it all subliminally promises that he won’t let us down.
The Verdict, which finds screenwriter David Mamet cooling down the snippy stylization his dialogue is known for, works well as a quasi-thriller with very clear heroes and villains. It gets great bad guys in James Mason, as the hospital’s unscrupulous, maddeningly well-resourced attorney, and Milo O’Shea, as the judge exasperatingly eager to lend the more-powerful a way more sympathetic ear than those actually harmed. But it’s even better as a character study where we commiserate so deeply with the down-on-his-luck character being studied that he becomes the kind of movie character we want to see keep living beyond the strictures of the narrative.
Peterson Reviews 