And Justice for All, the overstuffed but strangely compelling 1979 legal drama starring Al Pacino, begins with the voice of a child reading the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a sardonic start to a barbed, furious, free-swinging indictment of a legal system that, the movie suggests, has gone off the rails. Up is down, black is white, left is right.
A lone Baltimore defense attorney, Pacino’s Arthur Kirkland, is among the only people upset by what he sees. And make no mistake, he’s plenty upset.
This kind of movie often uses one case as an emblem of what’s wrong with the world. In And Justice for All, directed by Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, Moonstruck), that case revolves around a sadistic judge, Henry Fleming (John Forsythe), accused of beating and raping a young woman. The judge and Kirkland despise each other, but the judge wants Kirkland to represent him; he likes the optics of enlisting a man of Kirkland’s integrity, especially when their mutual enmity is widely known. The judge also has some dirt on Kirkland — pretty benign in the grand scheme but possibly enough for disbarment if Kirkland doesn’t play ball.
That situation alone might make for an interesting movie. But wait, there’s more.
Another one of Kirkland’s clients is in prison after a routine traffic stop and a case of mistaken identity. The kid is starting to crack up behind bars, and Kirkland asks Fleming to intercede. Yet another client, a transvestite, is facing long jail time for his passive role in a robbery. And Kirkland’s law partner, Jay (a young Jeffrey Tambor), is suffering a nervous breakdown after a murderer he got off on a technicality goes out and kills a couple of kids. (The moral conflict inherent to defending a guilty client is a running motif.) There’s also a second judge, played by the great Jack Warden, who fires a handgun from the bench and seems to have a troubling suicidal streak. To paraphrase Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis in Bull Durham, we’re dealing with a lot of stuff here — so much stuff that And Justice for All, like its main character, is constantly on the verge of a complete meltdown.
Written by Valerie Curtin and a pre-Diner Barry Levinson, And Justice for All toggles between high drama and scorched-earth satire, trying to do for (and to) the legal system what Paddy Chayefsky did for the television industry (Network) and healthcare (The Hospital). Despite its broadness — And Justice for All is a pretty messy movie — it often succeeds, thanks in no small part to one of the great and often overlooked Pacino performances. The film features a few of the actor’s patented Big Al moments, particularly the climactic trial scene: Told by the judge that he is out of order, Kirkland thunders back, “You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!” I actually remember seeing this moment in the trailer as a child and wondering, what’s this guy so upset about?
But taken as a whole, this performance has more in common with the seething, internalized Pacino turns of the first two Godfather movies than the later run of roles that bordered on self-parody (including the movie that finally won him that elusive Oscar, 1992’s Scent of a Woman). And Justice for All is as much whimper of anguish as howl of rage. Kirkland spends much of the movie trying not to give in to the madness that surrounds him, until the moment when everything he’s been tamping down explodes to the surface. He is Al. Hear him roar.
And Justice for All is also one of those great “when they were young” movies. There’s Tambor, with hair (until his character shaves his head, an act presented as a sign of his mental instability), and Levinson, before he got big. There’s also Craig T. Nelson as a prosecutor overly fond of football metaphors, and Christine Lahti as an ethics committee member who falls into bed with Kirkland (in an ethical lapse). Joe Morton plays a prison doctor, and Dominic Chianese, who played Johnny Ola in The Godfather Part II and Uncle Junior in The Sopranos, shows up as yet another problematic Kirkland client.
And Justice for All is hardly a lost movie, but it remains ripe for rediscovery. Many critics dismissed it for its lack of discipline, but this now seems like part of its charm. It is unruly and out of order, in the best possible sense.