… and Justice for All
They say this is an angry comedy playing with a suspenseful thriller, and filled in by one of the performances of Al Pacino that are so self-assured we hesitate to be otherwise. In it, he portrays an aggressive young Baltimore lawyer who has been within the system for about twelve years he’s not a fresh reformist out of law school but who, during the course of this film, is forced to tell American jurisprudence to insert its head where the sun never shines.
Pacino happens to have a judge named Fleming (John Forsythe) as his immediate motive for acting. He really looks like a judge. The razor cut gray hair, tired thoughtful eyes and the gentle sneer of this gentleman when he addresses an advocate in his court room.
He started saving time right at the beginning of his time on the bench by making up his mind that no case ever come before him because of mere considerations of humanity; such cases could then be handled with ease
That infuriates Pacino even more because Pacino has had a client rotting in jail because of Forsythe. The said client is innocent. Everyone seems agreed on that point. However, by accident or design, wrongly placed in custody during some minor police mix-up and will not get out until Pacino and Forsythe agree upon several inconsequential technicalities.
They cannot. It appears that Forsythe seems to derive pleasure from torturing Pacino silently while his client goes through psychotic episodes in prison. On top of all these disturbances in Pacino’s life there are other things going wrong too numerous to mention: “…and Justice for All” brings so many stories involving as many characters as possible into conflict with each other or having them cooperate successfully towards one outcome.
A girlfriend and neurotic partner in law also make up part of it; another crazy customer plus a very mad senile judge (Jack Warden) indulges his suicidal feelings by eating lunch sitting on a window sill on the fifth floor and, therefore, his helicopter is going to fly without either fuel or gas.
These subplots are thrown into the story more or less regardless of whether they are serious and subtle or broad and farcical; the movie consisted rather in a mixture of different approaches to the material. However, Pacino’s acting gives those things a kind of coherence.
We tentatively accept the film’s mood changes because Pacino does not waver and because he appears to remember what really matters even when the film goes off on tangents like flying helicopters.
Then it all tightens up just before you thought it was going to dissolve into sketches: Forsythe turns out to be one of the prime suspects of brutally raping and battering a young girl.
Is he innocent as he claims? Or guilty? He wants Pacino to handle his defense: Sooner or later, people will think that there was already collusion in place if lawyer who clearly hates Forsythe does not conduct their case for him.
But what if Forsythe is guilty? What does Pacino do then? Borrowed from “Network” and “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” and other recent celebrations of the manic rebel personality confronting itself with the immoral establishment, it’s remnants may be seen in what he did. The closing courtroom scenes are constructed as a machine to make the audience cheer, and the machine works.
Whether or not it works somewhat cynically will remain for viewers to decide: there have been so many variations in style and mood by the end of “…and Justice for All” that it is not a statement anymore but an anthology. Maybe we simply forget everything that happened before; all that farce, romantic comedy or soap opera when Al Pacino steps into that court room.
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