The Verdict movie review & film summary (1982) | Roger Ebert (2024)

There is a moment in "The Verdict" when Paul Newmanwalks into a room and shuts the door and trembles with anxiety and with theinner scream that people should get off his back. No one who has ever beenseriously hung over or needed a drink will fail to recognize the moment. It isthe key to his character in "The Verdict," a movie about a drinkingalcoholic who tries to pull himself together for one last step at salvaging hisself-esteem.

Newman plays Frank Galvin, a Boston lawyer who has had hisproblems over the years - a lost job, a messy divorce, a disbarment hearing, allof them traceable in one way or another to his alcoholism. He has a"drinking problem," as an attorney for the archdiocese delicatelyphrases it. That means that he makes an occasional guest appearance at hisoffice, and spends the rest of his day playing pinball and drinking beer, andhis evening drinking Irish and looking to see if there isn't at least one lastlonely woman in the world who will buy his version of himself in preference tothe facts.

Galvin'spal, a lawyer named Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden) has drummed up a little workfor him: An open-and-shut malpractice suit against a Catholic hospital inBoston where a young woman was carelessly turned into a vegetable because of amedical oversight. The deal is pretty simple. Galvin can expect to settle outof court and pocket a third of the settlement - enough to drink on for whatlittle future he is likely to enjoy.

ButGalvin makes the mistake of going to see the young victim in a hospital, whereshe is alive but in a coma. And something snaps inside of him. He determines totry this case, by god, and to prove that the doctors who took her mind awayfrom her were guilty of incompetence and dishonesty. In Galvin's mind, bringingthis case to court is one and the same thing with regaining his self-respect -with emerging from his own alcoholic coma.

Galvin'sredemption takes place within the framework of a courtroom thriller. Thescreenplay by David Mamet is a wonder of good dialogue, strongly seencharacters and a structure that pays off in the big courtroom scene - as thegenre requires. As a courtroom drama, "The Verdict" is superior work.But the director and the star of this film, Sidney Lumet and Paul Newman, seemto be going for something more; "The Verdict" is more a characterstudy than a thriller, and the buried suspense in this movie is more aboutGalvin's own life than about his latest case.

FrankGalvin provides Newman with the occasion for one of his great performances.This is the first movie in which Newman has looked a little old, a littletired. There are moments when his face sags and his eyes seem terribly weary,and we can look ahead clearly to the old men he will be playing in 10 years'time. Newman always has been an interesting actor, but sometimes hisresiliency, his youthful vitality, have obscured his performances; he has atendency to always look great, and that is not always what the role calls for.This time, he gives us old, bone-tired, hung-over, trembling (and heroic) FrankGalvin, and we buy it lock, stock and shot glass.

Themovie is populated with finely tuned supporting performances (many of them byBritish or Irish actors, playing Bostonians not at all badly). Jack Warden isthe old law partner; Charlotte Rampling is the woman, also an alcoholic, withwhom Galvin unwisely falls in love; James Mason is the ace lawyer for thearchdiocese; Milo O'Shea is the politically connected judge; Wesley Addyprovides just the right presence as one of the accused doctors. Theperformances, the dialogue and the plot all work together like a rare machine.

Butit's that Newman performance that stays in the mind. Some reviewers have found"The Verdict" a little slow moving, maybe because it doesn't alwayshum along on the thriller level. But if you bring empathy to the movie, if youallow yourself to think about what Frank Galvin is going through, there's not amoment of this movie that's not absorbing. "The Verdict" has a lot oftruth in it, right down to a great final scene in which Newman, still drinking,finds that if you wash it down with booze, victory tastes just like defeat.