For all?

About thirty minutes into And Justice For All, a thirtysomething Al Pacino meanders halfway across his smart Baltimore (!) apartment’s kitchen to light a candle on the Formica island at which he and his new love interest will be sitting down to a nice Chinese takeout meal. Why not? It’s 1979 and the newly-minted professional chicks who came of age in the late 1960s are totally cool with that shit as long as their cocky, well-paid suitors devote sufficient time and effort to post-meal cunnilingus.

But let’s be real for a minute: a product of a strange historical moment though it may be, this film is way too earnest for its own good. Pre-Scarface, able-to-control-the-tone-and-volume-of-my-voice A.P. reads through his d-r-a-m-a-t-i-c lines with the gleeful self-importance of a do-gooder elitist liberal torn straight out of a right-wing-stereotype sketchbook. Jeffrey Tambor’s drunken-rage scene (was he faking intoxication? tough to say, but drunk or not he could have been more convincing) does provide some balance, a token nod to those who would argue that it’s not just the folks in power who are rotten, that there are some legitimate examples of low life criminal scum out there who deserve to be behind bars, etc., but that subplot feels obligatory, much more forced-out than the rest.

The film’s real focus is of course the corrupting pull of power. Forsythe’s character is a caricature with not an ounce of decency or humanity in his body, a walking advertisement for judicial reform. He’s the worst and most ridiculous, but many of the film’s other major characters are pretty bad too, either foils or caricatures themselves. There’s the ‘good’ judge who understands—has for some time, yet continues to show up for work each day for some reason—the hopelessness of it all and makes it his mission to sensitize idealistic young lawyers to the fact when he’s not contemplating suicide; the poor-bastard kid stuck in iron-barred purgatory, a victim of mistaken identity, whose condition continues to deteriorate as the movie progresses; Craig T. Nelson’s ‘dark-side’ prosecutor who’s allowed his morals to ship out with the tide; even Pacino’s demented grandfather, a parody of a nice old man, whose refusal to admit his grandson had finally begun practicing law would be endearing were it not so contrived. Did these people ever exist? Maybe, in some form. Were they as fun to share Chinese takeout or a suicidal experimental-helicopter ride over B-Harbor with? Probably not. And they’re gone now, way gonner than the old-school fuck-him-Scotty-if-he-were-a-better-boxer-he'd-still-be-alive one-dimmer Tarantino somehow wrenched from Bruce Willis' smug heart fifteen years later. Some unsolicited advice: if you want to your film's characters to stand the test of time, don't leave them out to twist in the political winds. God's sake, Jewison put All out two years before Reagan began systematically erasing from public life every sensibility he must have stood for. Your ciphers can be sympathetic--just don't make them patsies.