The Verdict
In his book Movieland Jerome Charyn describes an interview with Paul Newman. Charyn is a fan, and Newman is – we gather, it isn’t stated – polite, guardedly receptive of positive feedback (to a compliment he responds, “I’m going to eat and drink comfortably tonight. This is doing terrific things to my ego”), and somewhat distant. Throughout he snacks from a bowl of popcorn kernels (I’m assuming these are popped or half-popped kernels. If he is eating unpopped kernels that adds an entirely different ambiance to the scene). Towards the end of the interview he says to Charyn, “I’d offer you some, but it’s nearly finished.”
Now, that is a strange thing to say. Presumably, at the beginning of the interview the kernels were not nearly finished. Newman could have offered Charyn some then. But he waited until he had eaten almost all of them, and then instead of offering Charyn the remainder, indicated that he could not, because there were not enough left for them both. We get the impression that Charyn does not fully impinge on Newman’s consciousness; that Newman would like to see and hear him and fully understand his needs vis-à-vis popcorn kernels, but that it is difficult for him to do so. Just as for the audience a movie star, an icon such as Newman seems hyperreal, to the icon we appear less than real. We are wraithlike, and it takes an exhausting effort of concentration for the icon to clearly discern us, even for a moment (in Infinite Jest, ghosts live a flickering hyper-speed existence, and to be perceived by the living must hold themselves absolutely still for great lengths of subjective time).
The above is a sort of fantasia. The Verdict is a heavy tranche of the purportedly real. It begins with a perfect shot, of Newman playing pinball on a grey morning. He is in a bar, his profile in shadow; through the window of the bar we see a street we know is cold. Half a mug of beer is placed on the windowsill, the beer a perfect mellow amber; next to it a cigarette is burning in an ashtray, placed just-so, so that the smoke rises along and contrasts against a black bar of window frame. The camera slowly pulls in on the profile of Newman’s face, and we get the message – time to get on with the character, the story. But we regret the loss of the tableau.
The script is by David Mamet, and the story is utterly workable. Newman is an alcoholic, down-on-his-luck lawyer, going to the funerals of strangers and passing out his business card. But he gets a hot case – a woman who was given the wrong anesthetic, now braindead, malpractice. Newman will represent her sister and brother-in-law, who want to settle quickly and use the money to start a new life in Phoenix. The hospital (the archdiocese that runs the hospital) offers a big settlement, but for Newman, now feeling the stirrings of a moral rebirth, that is not enough – he wants justice, he refuses, he will fight them in court. He wins. James Mason plays the swank attorney Newman squares off against (a repeat of the Newman/Mason conflict in The Mackintosh Man); Charlotte Rampling is a love interest who seems like she would be a very interesting woman if we ever got to know her, which we do not.
The Verdict, released in 1982 and set in Boston (although filmed largely in New York), has that intense sense of physicality which our service-industry age is in the process of retroactively conferring on the past - heightened here because Lumet is such a great director of smelted, molded, carved, erected, etched, quarried, stamped, assembled, produced things. He loves wrought iron, large desks, swinging doors, concrete floors, filing cabinets, varnish, brick; he loves to follow people up and down big chunky flights of stairs. The palate is muted, and that with the profusion of worked surfaces on display (that wrought iron again) gives the film the fine texture of a houndstooth suit. When Newman visits his client in the hospital – which at nearly forty years’ remove looks shockingly third-world – her room’s blood-red floor signals the violence done to her.
This is a movie that feels old beyond its years, certainly older than the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties. This could just be because artistic sympathy does not obey the strictures of time; or because the movie is ponderous (one day however, our aesthetics will flip, and the ponderous will seem new and the fleet of foot doddering…).
My own theory is that at this moment The Verdict is right on the very edge of what we consider - feel to be - the present age. It is part of the present, but it is the ancient present. Soon it will slip into the past, and then it will seem much newer to us. For now it lingers in our field of presentness, but it doesn’t mesh well with the whole, it is discordant - the musical discordancy of small intervals. Racial and above all sexual attitudes are more like ours than in the films of the forties, but off enough that the similarity becomes somehow painful – we’ve fallen into the uncanny valley of ethics. For instance, Rampling is sleeping with Newman in order to spy on him for the hospital’s lawyers; he finds out and in their final scene together he hits her in the face (in public, and no police are called (she doesn’t want them called)); the movie ends with her calling him, wanting to reconcile (she lays disheveled on a hotel bed, a towel over her eyes, looking like she belongs to a different and more organic film), while he sips coffee and ignores the phone. What are we to make of all this? If we think hard we can make something of it; if we study we can make more of it. But that is the whole point – integrating it into our perspective takes work, and we are dogged by the suspicion that those making the film were enough like us to defend their choices in terms that would on the surface be intelligible to us, yet enough different that we should examine any defense with extreme care, wary of slippages and faux amis.
To close, some notes on Mason and Newman. Mason was a huge star for the whole mid-part of the twentieth century, which is not something I knew until I started trying to learn more about film. I don’t know how to properly gauge his current state of fame, but my impression is that it’s vanishing. In the rankings of fast-vanishing fame, I think that non-composing musicians come first; but next come actors who are famous but not icons. Mason had a somewhat distinctive face - he shows patrician concern better than anyone - and an extremely distinctive voice, both breathy and rhythmic, something like Jay-Z’s. In The Verdict, where he is the heavy, he doesn’t play evil. He plays an amoral or post-moral man, who feels sympathy for those still struggling with the pains of morality.
Newman, the icon, the film treats carefully. He is paired here with Jack Warden, who plays an older ex-partner who assists Newman on the case. Since Newman is playing an alcoholic and Warden is not they make for an inversion of the Stewart/O’Connell pairing in Anatomy of a Murder. That film doesn’t particularly insist that its lawyer protagonists are good or bad; it’s enough to illustrate them going about their work. The Verdict on the other hand wants Newman to be good – again it is careful, careful. He’s an alcoholic, yes, but we don’t see the depravity of it. When he gets the shakes a sip of whiskey cures him. He doesn’t shit himself, or slur his words during his climactic speech to the jury (which, by the way, pretty much every climactic speech to a jury in a movie might as well be lorem ipsum – who cares what the guy is saying, we know what this beat is for). He punches Charlotte Rampling, but after she’s the one who calls him. He is privileged, the eggshell lines of his famous face are shielded (even age can’t break them). He wasn’t working at a high rate at this point in his career; as he tells Charyn, “Since you work less frequently there’s so big a stake, so much riding on every film.”
The studio by the way, wanted Newman and Rampling to reconcile at the movie’s end. Lumet protested that they shouldn’t, and won out – although looks who’s trying to reconcile at the end (Rampling) and who’s held aloof – Newman.
