And Justice for All (1979)

Directed by Norman Jewison. Starring Al Pacino, John Forsythe, Jack Warden, Jeffrey Tambor, Lee Strasberg, Christine Lahti, Larry Bryggman, Robert Christian, Thomas Waites, Sam Levene, Dominic Chianese, Craig T. Nelson, Victor Arnold. [R]

Pacino once again demonstrates his mastery of strung-out intensity as defense attorney Arthur Kirkland, a rational man pushed to the brink by jurisprudence indifference, and blackmailed into defending a judge (Forsythe) he despises on charges of rape and assault. Writers Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson have fashioned an attack on justice-system absurdity that’s an antiestablishment comedy undercut by bathetic lapses into contrived tragedy, and director Jewison doesn’t shy away from the opportunity to rattle a sociopolitical saber. It’s well-acted and intermittently entertaining, but Kirkland’s ordeal is crowded with so many judges, colleagues, clients, and personal life components that no central plot engine ever emerges, just a tangle of mostly trivial sub-plots pitched at varying degrees of lunacy (mostly in straitjacket territory). The argument is that Kirkland is overworked and overstressed and essentially trapped in an asylum of faulty procedure and incompetence, but the movie can neither support nor sustain this argument without more discipline and order. And speaking of, ahem, being out of order, the grandstanding, oft-(mis)quoted climax is like a microcosm of the rest of the film—flawed, overwrought, and not entirely convincing, but worth watching anyway. Levene’s final film, and Lahti’s first. Onscreen title is stylized as …and justice for all.

59/100