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TORONTO – Director David Dobkin says the father-son legal drama The Judge helped him work through his own family issues.
“I had this very complicated relationship with my mother and when she passed away I didn’t know how exactly to organize my feelings,” Dobkin said last month as The Judge opened the Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s always easier to find something to put it into as a vessel and maybe even rewrite it the way I wished it was. That was really the impetus … I didn’t understand that I would ever have to parent my parents. It was something I felt a little blindsided by.”
Opening Friday, The Judge stars Robert Downey Jr. as Hank Palmer, a hotshot Chicago lawyer who returns to his Indiana hometown for his mother’s funeral and ends up staying when his estranged and ailing father — a respected local magistrate (played by Robert Duvall) — is accused of a serious crime. The blue-chip cast is rounded out by Vincent D’Onofrio as Hank’s older brother, Vera Farmiga as his high-school sweetheart and Billy Bob Thornton as the opposing counsel in the ensuing court case.
The Judge was a family affair for Downey Jr., who produced the film along with his wife Susan Downey and Dobkin.
The director wasn’t the only one who poured his life experience into the material. Susan Downey said the two-year development period allowed everyone to put a personal stamp on the film, which also stars Dax Shepard, Ken Howard and Leighton Meester.
“In between other movies, whenever we were in town together, we’d get together and bring things to it,” Susan Downey said at the festival. “So over time, it was our collective experiences. I told my mom the other day: ‘There’s something in there for Papa.'”
Dobkin has said The Judge is a throwback to some of the ’80s films he admired, including The Verdict and Kramer vs. Kramer. The dramatic material is a departure for the director, who is known for comedies including The Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus. It’s also somewhat new terrain for Downey Jr., who showcases a more emotional side.
The Oscar-nominated actor said he found himself continually weeping during the shoot, but not because of a specific family experience.
“To me, I got caught up in the reality that the movie expresses,” the Chaplin star said at the festival. “Hank’s mom’s funeral is every funeral. And Hank’s cut-off with his dad is every cut-off that anyone’s ever had. It’s not even particularly a father-son story, because I could imagine that the judge could have been a mom. And I just think about these family dynamics and they light up constellations that are very emotional.”
Duvall and Downey Jr. have worked together previously in 1998’s The Gingerbread Man and 2007’s Lucky You. They share some heavy scenes in The Judge, which doesn’t shy away from showing the vagaries of old age, including a scene in which Hank cleans up his father in the shower after an accident.
“I just got to tip my hat to Bobby (Duvall) because it was one of those things,” Downey said of the scene. “We’ve all seen people take those risks and it’s executed in a way that you’re not ‘looked after’ when it happens, or it’s too graphic or it doesn’t have any balance. … It was just this thing that we felt that was important, it came obviously out of a sort of metaphoric experience the director had and it’s one of those things that we didn’t want to second guess it so we did it very carefully and we did it very quickly.”
As for being a producer, Downey Jr. said it felt natural to take a leadership role at this stage in his career.
“I just stick to the principle of being vigilant and trying to be of service. It’s just good medicine. It takes you out of your own ego’s head.”
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