The judge - right or honor

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Movie
German title The judge - right or honor
Original title The Judge
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2014
length 141 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
JMK 10
Rod
Director David Dobkin
script Nick Schenk
Bill Dubuque
production David Dobkin
Susan Downey
David Gambino
music Thomas Newman
camera Janusz Kamiński
cut Mark Livolsi
occupation
synchronization

The judge - right or honor (original title: The Judge ), also known as the judge - His most important case is an American film drama made in 2014 by director David Dobkin , who along with Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque also wrote the screenplay . The leading roles are starring Robert Downey junior , Robert Duvall and Vera Farmiga . The film premiered on September 4, 2014 at the Toronto International Film Festival . In Germany it was released on October 16, 2014.

action

Hank Palmer is a successful lawyer based in Chicago , Illinois. He is at a trial in the courtroom when he receives a call from his brother Glen telling him that his mother has died. Then Hank demands an interruption of the process, which the judge agrees to.

A little later, Palmer is on his way to his (fictional) hometown of Carlinville, Indiana, which he has not visited for many years, to attend his mother's funeral. The day before the funeral, he says goodbye to her in the morgue, where he meets his younger autistic brother Dale, who is filming with a Super 8 camera , and his older brother Glen, who wanted to be a baseball player, but he is unable to do so due to a car accident stayed. Then Hank goes to the local courthouse, where he sees his father Joseph Palmer - known by everyone as "the judge" - as presiding judge in the middle of a case . Although Judge Palmer leads the trial with great determination, he cannot think of the usher's name. Hank realizes that his father has lost memories.

The evening after the funeral, Judge Palmer plans to buy eggs at the local supermarket. The next morning, Hank and his brothers find their father's car with a damaged passenger side. Joseph denies causing this damage and blames his sons and grandchildren. Hank, who quarreled with his father many years ago and only returned to Carlinville for the funeral, is not interested in any of this, and he drives to the airport. Before his plane took off, he got a call from his brother Glen, telling him that a body had been found and that his father was therefore for questioning at the police station. Hank decides not to fly home and finds his father joking with the local police at the police station.

On the way home from the supermarket, Joseph is said to have hit a cyclist and fatally injured. The victim is the recently released murderer Mark Blackwell, who was convicted twice by Joseph Palmer. In the first trial, the judge only sentenced him to a minimum of 30 days for shooting around with a gun in his 16-year-old girlfriend's room. When he was released from prison, he drowned the girl in a water tank, for which he was sentenced to an additional twenty years in prison.

Joseph refuses to allow his son to represent him. Instead he hires the young attorney C. P. Kennedy. In the preliminary hearing, however, this fails so badly that the prosecutor Dwight Dickham admitted a murder charge. In the meantime, Hank becomes certain that something is wrong with his very dismissive father. Joseph then tells Hank that he has colon cancer , but thanks to chemotherapy it is in remission . During a conversation with Joseph's doctor, however, Hank learns that his father does not have much longer to live. Since mental confusion is one of the side effects of therapy, Hank wants to build that fact into his defense. Joseph firmly rejects this, because if it became known that he had continued to speak right with these symptoms for six months, the cases treated could possibly be open to attack. In view of his work and his honor, Joseph would like to keep his illness a secret.

The main trial for the murder of Joseph Palmer begins. Hank, who is now representing his father, and Kennedy, who is Hank's assistant, try to avoid a conviction for murder. Hank wants to avoid Joseph testifying because he can still hardly remember anything from the night in question. When his father threatens to dismiss him as a lawyer, however, Hank agrees to his testimony. During questioning by the prosecutor, Joseph suspects that he may have deliberately run over Mark Blackwell, which shakes everyone in the courtroom. Hank asks his father again and alludes to his health and the consequences of chemotherapy. Joseph does not want this and tries to dismiss his son as a lawyer while still on the witness stand, but the judge does not allow this. Hank eventually convinces the jury, and Joseph is found guilty of negligent homicide rather than murder, and is sentenced to four years in federal prison.

After seven months, Joseph is pardoned because of his poor health and the expected death. Hank picks up his father from prison and the two of them go fishing like he did when he was a child. When asked who is the best lawyer he knows, Joseph mentions Hanks' name. A little later he dies. After his father's funeral, Hank goes to the courtroom and looks at the chair from which the judge has conducted many trials.

background

The role of judge was also offered to Jack Nicholson and Tommy Lee Jones . Ultimately, however, he was played by Robert Duvall . For the female lead still came Elizabeth Banks into consideration, but Vera Farmiga got the role. The film was shot in the city of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts .

At a production cost of $ 50 million, the film grossed about $ 37 million in the US in just under a month. Worldwide revenues are $ 84 million.

synchronization

The German dubbed version was produced by Interopa Film GmbH Berlin. Kim Hasper wrote the dialogue book and Sven Hasper directed the dialogue .

actor speaker role
Robert Downey Jr. Charles Rettinghaus Hank Palmer
Robert Duvall Friedrich Georg Beckhaus Joseph Palmer
Vincent D'Onofrio Lutz Schnell Glen Palmer
Jeremy Strong Kim Hasper Dale Palmer
Ian Nelson Konrad Bösherz Eric Palmer
Paul-Emile Cendron Tim Knauer Joe Palmer
Sarah Lancaster Melanie Hinze Lisa Palmer
Vera Farmiga Claudia Urbschat-Mingues Samantha Powell
Leighton Meester Tanya Kahana Carla Powell
Billy Bob Thornton Joachim Tennstedt Dwight Dickham
Dax Shepard Markus Pfeiffer CP Kennedy
Balthazar Getty Michael Deffert Deputy Hanson
Denis O'Hare Bernd Vollbrecht Doc Morris
Jamison Haase Sven Hasper Dr. Brannamon
Lonnie Farmer Axel Lutter Gus
Frank Ridley Klaus Lochthove Jury chairman
David Krumholtz Gerrit Schmidt-Foss Mike Kattan
Grace Zabriskie Kerstin Sanders-Dornseif Mrs. Blackwell
Ken Howard Jürgen Kluckert Judge Sanford Warren
Daryl Edwards Reinhard Scheunemann Judge Stanley Carter
Matt Riedy Tobias Lelle Sheriff White

reception

Reviews

The film was shot very differently. In the US Rotten Tomatoes review collection , it was rated positively by 47 percent of the 168 professional critics. There it says in consensus: "Solid cast and beautifully filmed, but cliché through and through".

The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) awarded the title “particularly valuable” and described the film as an “exciting genre mixture of thriller and touching family drama”. The two main actors are "brilliantly acting", and the secondary characters are also "negotiated equally in all their depth and significance for the sensitive family structure". The “excellent camera work by Janusz Kamiński ” also received praise, providing images “which casually reveal many levels of narration and interpretation”. The Austrian Youth Media Commission also rated the film as “recommendable”. He is "[handicraft] staged in a stylish manner with beautiful pictures" and he succeeds in "keeping the tension over the entire length". The story lives "from the two great main actors and the closeness to reality of the family relationships and conflicts", while it does not always manage to "get around clichés and stereotypes". The “family drama” has “deeply human, touching and sometimes even funny facets”.

For Martin Schwickert from Tagesspiegel , the film is a “hybrid between family drama and justice thriller”. In the "top-class" drama, "flat" "great emotions" would evoke the audience. It is true that one “likes to watch the main actors at work”, but the end result “does not save Robert Downey Jr. either”. In the Standard , Bert Rebhandl criticized that “a penchant for the epic would often fail because of a poor character profile”; Director Dobkin also said he had "little sense of the breath of such a story", since he was always looking for the "direct route to the message". So be The Judge "sentimental men cinema par excellence" and a "barren homage to the white race." Rebhandl suspects the film was probably made primarily for the Oscars . The film service found that the “over-ambitious drama” followed “too many inadequately developed secondary lines” and “also had staging deficiencies”. However, the “concentration on the characters played by the great main actors” is “sympathetic”.

In Entertainment Weekly , Chris Nashawaty recognized the film as "a return to the rousing, mainstream court drama that flourished during the golden Grisham cinema era of the mid-1990s." In contrast to these, however, the (although “captivating”) court case forms “just the backdrop” behind which “a more emotional story about fathers and sons” is hidden, which “is played like a duet by two virtuoso actors who contributed to the film not only give everything they have, but probably more than is necessary at all ”.

AO Scott wrote in The New York Times that the "long, fluffy, meandering film" had little interest in saving time. The "good actors" were encouraged to "graze on a pasture that was overgrown with plot thickets and clumps of simple sentimentality". The title-giving main character is "the only reason to be interested in the film"; Judge Palmer is "a collection of character traits in search of a coherent figure" that Duvall comes "very close to through pure professionalism". Scott found "enough drama for three films, none of which would be particularly original"; After a while, The Judge turns out to be a "screeching, macho-like maudlin hidden family secrets melodrama" and it all comes down to "narrative growth", "which is as unconvincing as the suspiciously rural, nostalgic city in which everything happens" .

Awards and nominations

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Der Richter - Right or Honor . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2014 (PDF; test number: 147 368 K).
  2. ↑ a b Age rating for Der Richter - Recht oder Ehre . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Interesting facts about “The Judge - Law or Honor”, ​​filmstarts.de
  4. ^ Trivia (Worth knowing), Filmstarts.de
  5. ↑ The Judge . In: BoxOfficeMojo.com . Retrieved November 1, 2014.
  6. ↑ The Judge - Right or Honor. In: synchronkartei.de. German dubbing file , accessed on December 23, 2018 .
  7. ^ The Judge (2014). Rotten Tomatoes, accessed on November 4, 2014 (English): "Solidly cast and beautifully filmed but thoroughly clichéd, The Judge seems destined to preside over a large jurisdiction of the basic cable afternoon-viewing circuit."
  8. ↑ The Judge - Right or Honor. (PDF) German Film and Media Assessment (FBW), accessed on November 4, 2014 .
  9. ↑ Martin Schwickert: We have to talk. Der Tagesspiegel , October 16, 2014, accessed on November 4, 2014 .
  10. ↑ Bert Rebhandl: "The Judge": Robert Downey jr. as an arrogant lawyer . In: The Standard . October 17, 2014 ( online article [accessed November 4, 2014]).
  11. ↑ The Judge - Right or Honor. In: Filmdienst.de. Retrieved July 23, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Chris Nashawaty: The Judge: Review. Entertainment Weekly, October 17, 2014, accessed on November 4, 2014 (English): "The film is a throwback to the rousing, middle-of-the-road courtroom dramas that flourished during the Grisham box office gold rush of the mid- '90s. ... What makes the film more than just a dusty Grisham retread is that the case (as compelling as it is) is merely the backdrop for a more emotionally engaging story about fathers and sons played, like a duet, by two virtuoso actors who give the film not only all they have but probably more than it requires. "
  13. ^ AO Scott: Back Home Again, and Little Has Changed . In: The New York Times . October 10, 2014, p. C13 ( Online article [accessed on November 4, 2014] “Presumably to save time - something this long, baggy, meandering film, directed by David Dobkin from a screenplay by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque, otherwise has very little interest in doing.… Played by fine actors encouraged to graze in a meadow overgrown with thickets of plot and clumps of easy sentimentality.… The patriarch of the Palmer brood is the title character and the only reason to take an interest in this movie, since he is played by Robert Duvall . ... He is, more precisely, a collection of personality traits in search of a coherent character, which Mr. Duvall, by dint of sheer professionalism, comes very close to supplying. ... The road to that touching, foreordained moment passes through enough dramatic incident for three movies, none of them terribly original.… And then “The Judge” turns into a crime story, and a supershouty, macho-weepy, buried-family-secrets melodrama.… They add up to a sprawl of narrative that is as unconvincing as the suspiciously sprawl-free, nostalgia-tinged town where it all takes place. ”).