Published June 11, 2015
“The Judge,” the 2014 film starring Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. as a father and son, judge and lawyer, left a lot of good lines in my head, but the quote stuck in there right now wasn’t spoken by either of those Roberts.
Halfway through the movie, Vera Farmiga, who plays the former girlfriend of Downey’s character, explains to him the origin of the name of her establishment, the Flying Deer Diner, telling a story about a close call on the road one day while she was driving with her daughter in the car. “This deer jumps, flies over the hood, his back hoof taps the glass; one mile an hour faster, he’s coming through the windshield, all antlers and hooves killing me for sure, maybe both of us.
“I make a decision right then and there: Whatever had or hadn’t happened in the past, I was gonna be the hero of my own story.”
Their history has an unresolved storyline, as do several relationships in the movie, which reveals those loose ends along the way — sometimes just to us, sometimes to us and to the characters. What has or hasn’t happened in the past invests much of their motivation, and it drives the film through its twists and turns, toward its denouement.
I watched the movie on the recommendation of a co-worker, someone with whom I’ve had more than one conversation about Duvall and what he brings to his characters. “Watch ‘The Judge,’ ” my co-worker said when he left the office Monday night. The next day, I checked to see if it would be on cable soon. I discovered it would be on HBO a little more than 24 hours later, during what is my weekend off work. Perfect timing.
When I asked my co-worker for some background on the movie, he mentioned that critics were split about “The Judge,” that some called it contrived, among other unflattering things. I can understand that now, even as I found much to like about the movie.
The quote stuck in my head planted itself there even as I knew what some critics probably said out loud when, after telling the story, Farmiga’s character took stock of what she’d just said and asked, “Was that corny?”
I liked it because it spoke to self-determination in a way that perhaps sounded corny but elevated the idea of shaping one’s life to something heroic, with the hero appearing from within rather than from without. It felt like something someone who survived a near-fatal collision and decided to start her own business might say to herself, and then to others.
There was much in the movie that I could identify with, in small and larger ways, that fit the film’s darker subtexts of mortality, regret, unfulfilled promise and more. On a different day, I might have chosen to write about the dynamics of a son fishing with his father, or about a son watching his father suffer the effects of terminal cancer, or about a son visiting his mother’s grave during a time of crisis in his life, or about moving on with life after the dream of an extended baseball career ends, all of which I’ve experienced — or about the relationships between brothers, which I’ll never experience.
But not today. Today, the movie left me with something else I wanted to make note of here.
It’s unexpected, really, that the quote stuck in my head isn’t one delivered by Duvall, who could read the newspaper aloud for two hours and I’d buy a ticket and some popcorn and sit down to watch and listen. But on this particular day, the line that sank its hooks in me was the one about becoming the hero in one’s own story, and I think everyone could use at least a little belief in the possibility that they could make that happen.