"Few settings are as omnipresent in screen entertainment as the courtroom. The halls of justice, the argumentation of lawyers, dramatic backroom dealings, the telling facial expressions of the jury — all of it makes for very good drama. (And sometimes comedy, too.)
"Why? There are obvious hooks: salacious crimes, shocking lies, sudden gasps when a hidden revelation turns the case on its head. But there’s also something epic, almost mythic, about what goes on in a courtroom. Questions as old as Hammurabi or Moses, as ancient as civilization itself, are hashed out: good and evil, guilt and innocence, justice and fairness. Furthermore, modern presumptions of equality, democracy and objectivity face challenges. And that space, increasingly, is where the modern courtroom drama lives.
"American courtrooms are so familiar, thanks to Hollywood’s ubiquity, that it’s bracing to get plunked down into the minutiae of another legal system. The last few years have given moviegoers an unusually heady dose of French courtrooms. In 2022, Alice Diop’s searing “Saint Omer,” based on the real case of a woman accused of killing her infant, confronted the ways race, class and gender skew and degrade justice. Last year, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” electrified audiences with its courtroom scenes, which probed the knowability of the inner workings of a marriage.
"Now there’s Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case, nearly all of which takes place during the second trial of Pierre Goldman in 1976. It’s a true story: Goldman (played by an electrifying Arieh Worthalter) had been charged with four armed robberies years earlier, one of which resulted in the death of two pharmacists. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Goldman and his legal team appealed his case — some of it, anyhow. While he freely admitted to the robberies, he maintained that he was not involved in the killings. In 1975, he wrote a memoir entitled “Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France,” making him an icon among French leftists, and a month later the appeals court canceled the initial ruling.
"Set almost entirely within the courtroom, The Goldman Case is not a Hollywood-style heart-pumping work. But it’s plenty thrilling. Kahn, whose previous films include the 2004 thriller “Red Lights,” wrote the Goldman screenplay with Nathalie Hertzberg, who used newspaper articles and meticulous research to reconstruct what happened in the courtroom. The pair imbues the result with urgent, stirring drama even though it is, for the most part, just people standing at microphones, talking. And shouting. And looking outraged. Because of Goldman’s celebrity, his supporters crowd the room and punctuate proceedings with yelps of derision or support, whatever feels called for.
"But Goldman is at the center, and Worthalter gives a hypnotizing performance. By the time we meet Goldman, we know he’s a live wire; the first scene involves his lawyer reading a letter sent by Goldman to fire his representation a week before the trial, only to rescind the firing immediately. So once we’re in the courtroom, Goldman is the center of gravity. He decries the courtroom’s “pomp and theatricality.” He refuses to allow his defense to call character witnesses, insisting that because he is not guilty of the killings, it would be ridiculous to have people talking about how nice he is. Nice guys, he points out, can be murderers. The system ought to stand on evidence alone.
"That evidence, of course, is the tricky part. We are taught to think of courts of law as places where truths are spoken and discovered. But even people who aren’t lying, in the strictest sense of the word, can still make statements that are totally wrong. Memories can be compromised by time, mood, prejudice and much more.
"The shadow of antisemitism, for instance, hangs heavily over Goldman’s case; he’s the son of Polish Jewish refugees, and his Jewishness is clearly a factor in some of the witnesses’ recollection of the crime. It’s a topic that comes up again and again in the proceedings: Even those who claim no prejudice evince otherwise. At the same time, Goldman insists loudly on the racism of the French police, toward him as well as his Black friends. Equality may be an ideal, but ideals are aspirational, and they tend to be disposable.
"A movie like this can’t succeed without a keen visual sense. Otherwise it just comes off as Court TV or C-SPAN. Thankfully, the style of courtroom questioning in France differs from that of the United States — it’s less orderly, more freewheeling, with judge, prosecutors and defense all having a crack at witnesses in what can feel like a chaotic confrontation. That makes for great cinema, as does the visual design: There’s a kind of halo to the images that recalls the work of the mid-1970s. Furthermore, the camera keeps swinging back to Goldman’s furrowed brow as he listens with such intensity that you expect his brain might bust right out of his forehead.
"There’s a great deal of philosophical and ethical inquiry layered into The Goldman Case, much of which surfaces in testimony and in Goldman’s fiery insistence on his own innocence. What it comes down to, in the end, is a question of whether a legal system based on idealistic notions of freedom, justice, brotherhood 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’re suggestible. We’re prejudiced. We’re forgetful. We’re fearful. We’re certain of ourselves, and then we’re dead wrong. We judge — and those judgments judge us back."