An innocent man in fear of his life faces a biased jury (“To Kill a Mockingbird”). A guilty man is acquitted after shocking revelations from his wife (“Witness for the Prosecution”). In The Trial of Donald Trump, an adult film star confronts a once and possibly future president who, she claims, stripped to his underwear while she used the bathroom in a hotel suite in Lake Tahoe.
As film-makers have always grasped, a courtroom is inherently theatrical. It brings adversaries into uncomfortable proximity. Emotional and ethical depths are plumbed, but decorum must be maintained. Mr Trump is charged with falsifying documents to cover up a payment in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with him a decade earlier (he denies all of it). The case has many vital elements of courtroom drama, only slightly askew.
Sensational witnesses are a key ingredient, as they crumple under cross-examination or blurt out explosive facts. In “A Few Good Men” Colonel Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson) is goaded into admitting he ordered a lethal beating. In “Anatomy of a Fall”, a child helps acquit his mother of killing his father.
Some of the technicolour witnesses in Mr Trump’s ongoing trial have been brutal. Michael Cohen, his fixer-turned-foe, roundly incriminated him. Ms Daniels recalled spanking him with a magazine. (“Peggy Peterson” and “David Dennison”, pseudonyms for her and Mr Trump, made cameos.) Others seemed torn between truth and loyalty. Two former aides, Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, cried on the stand.
Mr Trump insists the trial is part of a political plot against him: call it Witness for the Persecution. Still, like other courtroom dramas, it has been educational. In “Amistad”, the underlying theme is slavery. In “Kramer vs Kramer”, it is parenting. This trial has cast light on jobs that tend not to feature in careers fairs—porn stars, sex-tape brokers and shakedown artists. The exotic vocabulary has included “hush money”, “catch and kill” and “gag order”.
The defendant may or may not testify. But an internal conflict is brewing. In “A Few Good Men”, Jessup is sure his authority on his base is absolute. So how did the beating happen? Likewise, Mr Trump portrays himself as eagle-eyed and frugal. (“Penny-pinching?” he once wrote. “You bet.”) Yet somehow he signed cheques to Mr Cohen which, prosecutors say, reimbursed him for paying off Ms Daniels. Two rebukes for contempt of court have redoubled the jeopardy: Mr Trump risks not only a prison sentence after the trial, but winding up behind bars during it.
Often the most compelling figures in courtroom dramas are the lawyers. In “The Verdict” Paul Newman’s wastrel attorney finds redemption in a medical malpractice suit. In “Jagged Edge”, Glenn Close’s character sleeps with a murderous client. Mr Trump has sometimes seemed to be just plain sleeping. But he has also been heard “cursing audibly”; his harried lawyers have been asked by the judge to rein him in.
The greatest of all legal dramas, “12 Angry Men”, takes place almost entirely in the jury room, where Henry Fonda argues that there is reasonable doubt in what seems an open-and-shut case. Only the current jurors know how Mr Trump’s habit of glowering at them as they enter the court will go down. Ditto his choice to bad-mouth them outside it.
Above all, in classic courtroom stories the stakes are high. Sometimes, as the innocent are convicted or the guilty walk free, the legal system itself is on trial. Or the ultimate culprit may be society at large: “To Kill a Mockingbird” condemns racial injustice; “Inherit the Wind” critiques both religious fundamentalism and McCarthyism.
Mr Trump’s is the first criminal trial of an American president. At its heart is “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election”, says the prosecution. That sounds monumental. Yet it keeps lapsing from gravity to gross-out satire—less “A Few Good Men” than A Few Rude Men—as when prosecutors assured the judge there would be no “descriptions of genitalia”.
But its main dramatic flaw is an absence of surprise, which ought not to matter in a real court, but does in politics and movies. “Jagged Edge” has a hidden typewriter, “12 Angry Men” a pawnshop switchblade. For all the ugliness on show, so far Mr Trump’s trial seems unlikely to jolt his supporters. Some will dismiss the charges as lies. To paraphrase Jessup, others may ponder much of the seamy testimony and shruggingly conclude: You’re goddamn right he did!
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