Vin Diesel shows a little range in Sidney Lumet’s courthouse comedy Find Me Guilty, stretching his chops outside the action and semi-action comedy flicks he most often makes. Not that I don’t enjoy both of the linked films, but it’s nice to see Diesel try to move outside the little square Hollywood tries to draw around people to make their investments safer.
I’d probably give the biggest chunk of credit to Lumet. He’s been making terrific films for half century now, a slew of ’50s Golden Age live TV dramas and 1957′s 12 Angry Men (tell me the faceoff between Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb isn’t among your favorite mano-a-mano verbal brawls), 1964′s Cold War masterpiece Fail-Safe (Fonda again), the ’70s trifecta of Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and Network, Paul Newman’s underrated The Verdict and, his last great movie IMO before a run of dogs, River Phoenix’s Running On Empty.
FMG retells the true story of the lengthiest mafia trial in American judicial history when, in the mid-80s, 20 New Jersey members of the Luccese family were prosecuted on 76 criminal counts in a trial that lasted over 21 months. Can you imagine being on the jury for all that time? Me neither. Amusingly, after all the hundreds of witnesses and mounds of evidence the jury only needed 14 hours to get the verdict.
Vin plays Giacomo “Jackie Dee” DiNorscio, a clearly cruel mobster but one who still kept to omerta at a time when it was beginning to break down as others were taking deals and ratting rather than doing time. The Feds offered DiNorscio a deal three times but even after a separate drug bust landed him a 30 year sentence he refused to talk. In fact, of the 20 defendents he was the only one already in prison; he went back to the Manhattan lockup each night while his associates slept in their own beds.
Fed up with attorneys who, after all, did little good as he was railroaded to that 30 year term, Jackie decides to do for himself and this is where the comedy comes from. Lately, when a movie is ‘based on a true story’ you can give it a miss more often than not but Lumet and co-writers T.J Mancini and Robert J. McCrea (both with their first screenplay credit here) deftly take the larger than life mook with nothing to lose, tread carefully around DeNorscio’s awful CV and what in real life was a boring, neverending process and come out the other end with a fairly lighthearted fish out of water comedy.
The opposition, the man who is really the good guy, is a guy who just wants to put some very bad men behind bars, US Attorney Sean Kierney played well by Linus Roache (a Mancunian who almost has the mostly-neutral Mid-Atlantic accent correct). Kierney rightly cannot understand how this chubby, balding mobster is beating him with the jury but Americans have frequently sided with the populist over the intellectual. 21 months is a long time to sit and listen and Fat Jackie, well, he entertained them. He admitted to plenty of crimes, just not the ones for which he was on trial, and was able to shovel some serious dirt on (what Lumet presented as) the most important witnesses.
Good supporting cast too. Alex Rocco, looking really old, as the crew’s boss; Peter Dinklage (Station Agent) as the lead defense attorney (the constant deliberate wheeling out of his podium got annoying after awhile); The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi as an FBI agent and one of the discredited witnesses; Annabella Sciorra as Diesel’s ex-wife who, of course, still has some feelings for him and has them, er, interrupted by guards during a brief jail visit; and, Ron Silver as the judge, his best scenes coming in his office and from riding herd on the very large herd.
recommended
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