Sean Burns
The key to appreciating director Norman Jewison’s oddball 1979 legal drama …And Justice For All is understanding that all of the characters are insane. Most of them didn’t start out that way. Once upon a time, some of these folks were idealistic overachievers who earned degrees and opened profitable firms, before being driven out of their minds by a criminal justice system designed to reduce complicated human tragedies into easily quantifiable abstractions. We’re often told that this is a nation of laws, not people. And it’s that humanity that gets lost in the labyrinthine technicalities and bureaucratic red tape bedeviling defense attorney Arthur Kirkland, a sloppy, chivalrous sort played by Al Pacino as a noisily fraying nerve. “Don’t you care about people?” he cries out constantly to his colleagues, in a voice we hear shredding itself to ribbons as the story wears on. Pacino doesn’t smoke in the movie, but he still sounds like a carton of cigarettes and looks like an ashtray.
The film can be seen as the third chapter of a 1970s urban crime trilogy, following Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, in which Pacino won the hearts and minds of audiences as a lone, messy man (grand)standing against a broken system, fighting authority but authority always wins. It can also be seen as the codification of what would become Pacino’s movie star persona, the first time he started treating that magnificent head of hair as a co-headliner and when his squeaky Michael Corleone whisper got gruff. The ending of the film is the beginning of the broadly theatrical, “LOUD-quiet-LOUD” monologues that became the actor’s signature, for better and worse. (One could argue, and I often have, that Pacino’s big Oscar moment in Scent of a Woman is but a pale imitation of this film’s ferocious final scene.)
Scripted by Valerie Curtain and her then-husband, Baltimore’s chief cinematic chronicler Barry Levinson, …And Justice For All is, in Jewison’s words, “a terrifying comedy” following a disastrous run of cases for Kirkland, culminating in the Maryland attorney being blackmailed into defending his nemesis, a well-respected, hard-assed judge (played by a post-Charlie’s Angels, pre-Dynasty John Forsythe) accused of brutally assaulting and raping a female court clerk. Harrowing stuff, but Jewison juggles vignettes full of jaundiced absurdism and gallows humor throughout, with slapstick comic interludes involving a pistol-packing, suicidal judge (the great Jack Warden) bumping up against abrupt veers into bleakness, as when Kirkland’s goofball partner (Jeffrey Tambor) learns that a client he got off on a technicality came home and murdered two children. Tambor’s subsequent nervous breakdown is both deeply disturbing and kind of a hoot, much in the same way that the movie always feels like it’s uneasily shifting under your feet.
While defending a wrongfully charged trans sex worker (treated with a dignity and respect downright shocking for a film made in this era) as well as an innocent man doing hard time over a clerical error, Kirkland also somehow finds the time to romance Christine Lahti’s willowy ethics investigator, whose committee has his irreverent courtroom antics in their crosshairs. I’m not sure what’s more unbelievable: (a) that she’d so easily fall into bed with the subject of an investigation or (b) that Pacino manages to seduce her while barking insults with his mouth full of Chinese food. But Lahti is so cool and composed amid all the movie’s shouty neuroses that you welcome her steadying presence. This was her big screen debut, as well as Tambor’s, and also the first film for Craig T. Nelson, who comes in way too hot playing an overzealous prosecuting attorney. You can’t help but feel a little sorry for the young actor, having to go toe-to-toe with ’70s Pacino.
The star brought along two of his Godfather II guys. Dear friend and old acting teacher Lee Strasberg gets a few sweet scenes as Kirkland’s doting, dementia-addled grandfather, while a delectably sleazy Dominic Chianese shows up as a client with questionable connections. (Chianese also played Pacino’s father in Dog Day, but we know him better as Tony Soprano’s Uncle Junior.) It’s a crowded cast, and even if you don’t always feel like Jewison is in complete control of the proceedings, that adds to the discombobulating rush of incident, and is probably why the plot’s shocking twists pack the punches that they do. A more focused, emotionally coherent version of this movie wouldn’t be nearly as exciting – though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Dave Grusin’s strenuously wacky, all-over-the map score was used to torture inmates at Gitmo.
These days, …And Justice For All would be the stuff of series television. (Indeed, if you squint hard enough while you’re watching it, you can see David E. Kelley’s entire career.) But that would deny us the pleasure of a bona fide movie star popping off in one of the most absurdly satisfying endings of the 1970s. I can still remember the first time I saw it on an old rented VHS tape, because I physically leapt off my parents’ couch when Pacino started bellowing in the courtroom. The last scene of this movie has become a catch-phrase, a cliché, and I’ve watched it at least 100 times. There’s still an almost unbearable suspense as he approaches the jury. The highest compliment one can pay an actor is that not only does Arthur Kirkland appear unsure of what he’s about to say next, but Al Pacino seems pretty surprised, too.
“…And Justice for All” is streaming on Amazon Prime.
