Frank Galvin is a mess. A drunken has-been of a lawyer, disillusioned by past failures and the corruption that plagues the justice system, he whiles away his time drinking whiskey and playing pinball at his favorite Boston bar. When Frank takes a case all but guaranteed to yield a fat settlement — a Catholic hospital gave a pregnant woman the wrong anesthetic, rendering her a vegetative state, and the diocese wants the whole thing to go away — he sees dollar signs spinning before his eyes.
But then something happens. Frank comes down with a case of conscientiousness. He decides he can win this case, stick it to the fat cat defense attorney and establishment judge, and take a chance on doing the right thing for the first time since he can remember. He bends some rules along the way. But in The Verdict, Sidney Lumet’s blunt, masterful 1982 legal drama, rules are made to be bent. This is a brutal, bare-knuckle world that hides behind a veneer of law and civility, where moral compromise and outright cheating carry the winners over the finish line. Frank, played by Paul Newman in one of his most fragile, resonant performances, hasn’t crossed that line in a long time. Now he’ll cross a few others to do so.
Lumet, who died in 2011, made so many great movies that it’s easy to lose track of them. A partial list includes 12 Angry Men (another all-time great legal film), Fail Safe, The Pawnbroker, Dog Day Afternoon and Network. His specialty was heightened dramatic realism, gritty but never dry; he cut his teeth in live television and always retained that format’s sense of immediacy. For The Verdict, he had an ace in the hole, a seasoned playwright and rising screenwriter named David Mamet.
Mamet’s screenplay for The Verdict, which earned one of the film’s five Oscar nominations, doesn’t have the mannered (and often quite effective) staccato terseness of his most famous works, best exemplified by Glengarry Glen Ross (“Always be closing!”). But it’s still a firecracker. The Verdict is deeply cynical about the machinations of the justice system, the backroom relationships between pliable judges and powerful attorneys and how the deck stacks against those who don’t know how (or refuse) to play the game. In this case, that would be Frank, a black sheep who decides to tilt against the windmill of Boston’s legal establishment.
The prime representative of that establishment is Ed Concannon, a smooth, well-staffed, ethically dubious defense attorney played by a sardonically purring James Mason. Concannon knows all the angles, and he knows the judge presiding over this case, a glib old Irishman played by the great character actor Milo O’Shea (who, coincidentally, also played Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Ashland on The West Wing). These two have no intention of giving Frank a fighting chance; they’ll use every trick in the book to keep him down. Concannon even enlists a honey pot (Charlotte Rampling) to get close to Frank and learn his strategy. When Frank discovers this treachery, it leads to the most unsettling scene in the movie, which rattles you regardless of how many times you see it.
Not all is darkness in The Verdict, but even victory carries very little glory. Frank’s successes are muted, and they always come at a cost. Such qualities place the film in a tradition more in line with ‘70s Hollywood, with its fatalistic overtones and Vietnam/Watergate hangover, than the more escapist, triumphalist ‘80s, to which The Verdict technically belongs. Newman is entirely at home in this milieu, playing a beautiful loser on the brink who eyes a last chance at redemption. There is no fist-pumping here. Law is a blood sport; if you’re lucky, you get to wake up the next day and keep punching.