Few settings are as ubiquitous in screen entertainment as the courtroom. The halls of justice, the arguments of the lawyers, the dramatic backroom dealings, the facial expressions of the jury – all these make for a very good drama. (And sometimes comedy too.)
Why? There are obvious hooks: the gruesome crimes, the shocking lies, the sudden gasp when a hidden revelation turns the case on its head. But there is something epic, almost mythical, about what goes on in the courtroom. Gone are the old questions of Hammurabi or Moses, ancient as civilization itself: good and evil, guilt and innocence, justice and the just. Moreover, modern notions of equality, democracy and objectivity face challenges. And that’s where, increasingly, modern courtroom drama resides.
American courtrooms are so familiar, thanks to the ubiquity of Hollywood, that he is willing to immerse himself in the nuances of other legal systems. The past few years have given moviegoers an unusual look at French courtrooms. In 2022, Mati Diop’s Searing “Saint Omer,” Based on the real-life case of a woman accused of murdering her infant child, caste, class and gender skew and justice faced with degradation. Last year, Justin Tritt’s “Anatomy of a Fall” electrified audiences with its courtroom scenes, which delve into knowing the inner workings of marriage.
Now there’s Cedric Kahn’s “The Goldman Case,” almost all of which took place during the second trial of Pierre Goldman in 1976. It’s a true story: Goldman (played by an electrifying Erich Werthalter) was charged with four armed robberies years earlier, one of which resulted in the deaths of two pharmacists. Sentenced to life in prison, Goldman and his legal team appealed his case — some of it, anyway. While he freely confessed to the robbery, he maintained that he was not involved in the murder. In 1975, he wrote a memoir called “Vague Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France,” which made him an icon among the French left, and a month later an appeals court overturned the initial verdict.
Set almost entirely in a courtroom, “The Goldman Case” is not a Hollywood-style heart-pumping work. But it’s plenty exciting. Kahn, whose previous films include the 2004 thriller “Red lights“Goldman” wrote the screenplay with Nathalie Hertzberg, who used newspaper articles and meticulous research to reconstruct what happened in the courtroom. The duo imbues the result with immediate, exciting drama, even though it’s mostly just people standing at microphones, talking. and shouted. And looked furious. Because of Goldman’s celebrity, his supporters crowd the room and punctuate the proceedings with shouts of sarcasm or support, whichever seems necessary.
But Goldman takes center stage, and Werthalter gives a hypnotizing performance. By the time we meet Goldman, we know he’s a live wire; In the first scene his lawyer reads a letter sent by Goldman a week before the trial to dismiss his representation, only to immediately cancel the firing. So once we’re in the courtroom, Goldman is the center of gravity. He deplores the “ostentatiousness and theatrics” of the courtroom. He refused to allow his defense to call qualified witnesses, insisting that since he was not guilty of murder, it would be ridiculous for people to talk about how nice he was. Nice guys, he points out, can be killers. The system must stand on evidence alone.
That proof, of course, is the hard part. We are taught to think of courts of law as places where truth is spoken and discovered. But people who do not lie, in the strict sense of the word, can still make statements that are completely false. Memories can be compromised by time, mood, bias, and more.
For example, the shadow of anti-Semitism hangs heavily over Goldman’s case; He is the son of Polish Jewish refugees, and his Jewishness is clearly a factor in some witnesses’ recollection of the crime. It’s a theme that comes up again and again in the proceedings: Even those who don’t claim prejudice are proven otherwise. At the same time, Goldman insists on the racism of the French police and his black friends. Equality may be an ideal, but ideals are aspirational, and they are disposable.
A film like this cannot succeed without a keen visual sense. Otherwise it just goes off as Court TV or C-SPAN. Thankfully, the style of courtroom interrogation in France is different from that in the United States—it’s less orderly, more freewheeling, with judge, prosecutor and defense all cracking down on witnesses in what feels like a chaotic confrontation. It makes for great cinema, as does the visual design: the images have a kind of halo that recalls the work of the mid-1970s. Moreover, the camera keeps panning back to Goldman’s brow as he listens so intensely that you expect his brain to burst out of his forehead.
“The Goldman Case” contains a great deal of philosophical and ethical inquiry, much of which surfaces in the testimony and Goldman’s own fiery insistence of his innocence. What it comes down to, in the end, is a question of whether a legal system based on idealistic notions of liberty, justice, fraternity and equality can ever live up to its own ideals. The problem with any such system is that it depends on humans, and humans are notoriously unreliable narrators. We are suggestive. We are biased. We have forgotten. We are afraid. We are certain of ourselves, and then we are wrong. We judge – and those judgments judge us back.
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