Cédric Kahn’s landmark courtroom movie does what American filmmakers can’t.
The media lie to us so incessantly that Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case, a boldly direct reenactment of France’s 1970s ethnicity-centered trial, gives off continuous shocks — shocks in recognition of the complicated human truths we’re routinely denied.
Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter) nearly ruins his 1975 appeal trial, relitigating four armed robberies and two murders, by insisting on his innocence and basing that appeal on his background as a Polish-born Jew living in France. Director Kahn (co-writing with Nathalie Hertzberg) re-creates the trial to illustrate the complexity of France’s internal conflicts — ethnic bias and intellectual sophistication. Worthalter’s handsome, angry Goldman, a left-wing radical, is so oversmart and cagey that he flips the proceedings into a circus of identities, temperaments, and social values.
Kahn’s complications never stop, beginning with Goldman’s class-based reproach of his defense attorney and fellow Jew, Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari); rounds of contradictory testimonies; and ending with the verdict almost drowned out by hubbub from the courtroom’s prejudiced spectators.
The Goldman Case is so intensely focused that it answers the need for legal and moral clarity that’s been ignored — if not destroyed — by our own recent judicial swindling. Kahn whips up such awe over the process of Goldman’s appeal that this movie, despite its specifics, feels like a mirror of current crises.
Goldman’s battles with prosecutors, his defense team, witnesses, the judge, and the jury automatically rouse suspicion about the justice system’s collapse. Its legal minutiae is especially difficult to watch after the mockery of jurisprudence in the January 6 trials and unrelenting election-interference lawfare.
Goldman’s complaint about his lead attorney — “I see now that Kiejman remains in the foul swamp of society life” — uncannily evokes the revenge of the D.C. swamp against Donald Trump. Yet the Goldman trial also resembles the cultural earthquake of the O.J. Simpson trial.
Choosing a semi-documentary style that captures the flat, fluorescent light of modern courtrooms, cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli scrupulously advances past the phony swish-pan realism common to TV, then shifts to burnished hues during the verdict. Kahn presents an extraordinary panoply of European, African, and Latin faces — physiognomies that instantly convey a liberal democracy in conflict. More varied than Francesco Rosi’s great Italianate courtroom films Hands over the City and Salvatore Giuliano, it’s also more convincing than last year’s facile feminist Anatomy of a Fall.
By challenging contemporary political presuppositions, The Goldman Case leans into and exposes cultural biases. Goldman seeks to emulate the heroism of his Holocaust-survivor parents, conveniently claiming the righteousness of communist radicals to excuse his own criminal license (set down in a published memoir he cites from the dock). Goldman is like a wily, self-justifying Philip Roth invention that asserts a new kind of J’accuse by shaming the court and invoking the pressure of Jewish history.
Defense attorney Kiejman summarizes: “It’s tempting to see [Goldman] as a Dostoevsky hero — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, pick any title. A result of the tragedy of European Jews. He’s not exceptional but is exceptionally tormented.” And Worthalter’s César-winning turn, derived from Yves Montand’s impassioned revolutionary roles, suggests a post-Holocaust variation on the martyrdom that endowed Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith (which the media withholds from today’s lawfare targets). He articulates the political cunning that was unavailable to the pathetic, illiterate miscreants in Ava DuVernay’s manipulative, pandering When They See Us about the Central Park Five.
And then it gets deeper, when second defense lawyer Chouraqui (Jeremy Lewin) explains Goldman’s private paradox: “To leave the ghetto and escape obscurantism, there was only Zionism or Communism. That’s a fundamental aspect of Judaism, not a religious aspect but a link with universalism, with historicity. Think of the emblematic history of revolutionary Jews.” It’s an invocation of the “anti-fascist” sentiments that now roil college campuses. David Mamet should see this, Darren Aronofsky, too.
The Goldman Case ought to be a landmark movie except that Millennial American film culture is in the clutches of politicized intellectual frauds. Goldman’s prosecutors warn him to “keep the fancy lines for your leftist pals,” which frightens off most movie gatekeepers. They surely object to the closing argument: “[Goldman] panders to the intelligentsia even if the police and the law are undermined. I’m afraid the revolution is a tawdry consumer good. You sold yourself to the capitalism you wanted to annihilate.” The complexity of The Goldman Case is so fascinating, it catches film culture in its own contradictions.