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the verdict
For kicks, I’ve started looking back at some of the movies in my DVD library. My original goal — to write about some of my favorite movies, and some that I consider very underrated — remains, but this particular movie could never be considered underrated. It contains what many people consider Paul Newman’s finest performance, it’s only the second filmed screenplay of David Mamet’s long writing career, and it was nominated for five Oscars in 1983. I was five years old. I was much more interested in Superman than in the likes of this. This movie opens on a very lonely scene: a tired man playing pinball in a bar. He’s standing next to a window outlined in frost; outside it’s cold and gray, and it appears to be very early in the day, maybe even morning. A cigarette smolders in an ashtray on the window sill. An unfinished glass of beer sits beside it. The only sounds come from the pinball machine, sad little bells and mechanical clanks. The man pauses to visit the glass and the cigarette. He plays a little more. His head is somewhere else, and you get the idea that it’s been there for a very long time. This scene, and the one that follows — eye drops, breath spray, slipping his card to a grieving widow at a wake and being pitched out of the funeral home — tell you all you need to know about Frank Galvin. This is Paul Newman’s movie. Sure, it’s a Sidney Lumet film, but one thing I’ve always enjoyed about Lumet’s movies — at least, the six or seven of them that I’ve seen — is the way he hangs back and lets his actors really own the screen. You could probably argue that almost any movie starring Newman is Newman’s movie, but that wouldn’t change the fact that this movie belongs to him, too. You follow? Newman creates one of the classic screen alcoholics here. He’s rowdy and charismatic when he’s drinking with friends; he’s a stormcloud when he’s drinking alone; he’s a wreck afterward either way. Once he was successful partner in a big firm; now he’s a drunken ambulance chaser who has lost every one of the cases he’s tried since hanging out his shingle. This is a man who long ago let go of the end of his rope. The opening scenes of the movie are such effective shorthand that none of this is a surprise as it unfolds. I love that the movie’s made up like a legal thriller, but is anything but. The case that Galvin is thrown as a last handout by a friend becomes his stepladder to some kind of redemption. It begins as just another job, and then turns into something else. Galvin seems knocked off of his feet by the idea that he might not quite be finished yet. The movie becomes the story of his own personal justice, maybe even at the expense of that which his clients seek. But with this movie you always come back to Newman’s performance. I’ve seen an awful lot of his movies, and this one seems like the first in which he looks a little weary. The part calls for it, and it’s one he probably couldn’t have played ten years earlier, at least not as effectively. Watching it now, some twenty-three years later, you can see glimpses of the roles he’s played recently, particularly those based on Richard Russo’s novels, like Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool. The movie works because Newman is for the first time not a movie star, not the handsome renegade, but a defeated, achingly tired everyday guy. It’s good shit.
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