The Verdict
Director: Sidney Lumet
(Netflix Instant)
As a broken-down, alcoholic lawyer in 1982’s The Verdict, Paul Newman turned in one of the finest performances of his career. He should’ve won the Best Actor Oscar for it, as a matter of fact, although that overdue honor had to wait several years later until the decidedly less memorable The Color of Money.
The Verdict isn’t for all tastes. It’s deliberately paced, which is the highfaluting way of saying it’s a little slow. My 85-year-old mother would say it felt like it went on for eight hours. But I like that director Sidney Lumet luxuriates in the environs of a cold, grim, and thoroughly corrupt Boston. It’s the sort of town that provides a hiding place for Frank Galvin (Newman), an ambulance chaser whose workday ranges from playing pinball in the neighborhood bar to handing out business cards to mourning widows in funeral parlors.
But then Frank is handed a seemingly routine medical malpractice case, and the particulars of it — a forgotten young woman left in a vegetative state after being given the wrong anesthetic in a Catholic hospital — awaken a moral conscience he thought he had drowned long ago.
If that sounds like familiar melodrama, well, it should. Lumet and screenwriter David Mamet don’t exactly flout convention here, but they burrow deeply into a terrific set of characters and let an equally terrific cast do what they do. Luckily, that cast includes James Mason, Jack Warden, Lindsey Crouse, Milo O’Shea, and a bewitching Charlotte Rampling.
