The Cinematheque

“Whether the prisoners are innocent or guilty of the specific charge, the injustice seems cosmic. They’re trapped by everything … Wiseman’s open-eyed approach to the stories of their lives is perhaps motivated less by reforming zeal than by his own sense of the mystery of those lives.”

Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Law school, Frederick Wiseman has said, was a place he survived by applying the technique of close-reading analysis, honed on poetry, plays, and novels, to the ​“pedestrian language” of court decisions. The longest and most dramatic of the director’s films to this point in his career, Juvenile Court is a film about reading. Wiseman catches two sides in an act. Adults on one side—including the unfazed Judge Turner—wield life-changing power and claim to know how to read the young offenders that enter into their purview. Cornered youth sit opposite, many of them struck inarticulate by fear and dread as they read the situations they are plunged into: accusations of crimes, some of them violent, based on laws they might only partially understand. The volume of cases is vast, but Wiseman patiently decodes each one, achieving something only a stylistic half-step away from the unvarnished beauty and piercing clarity of the great works of monochrome neorealism.

“From the probings of Rorschach tests to a dramatic finale involving plea-bargaining, we are exposed to the multiple facets of the system … Wiseman cares deeply about his subjects, and his genius lies in his ability to make us share that care. Never didactic, he is, nevertheless, a master educator.”

Jerrold Hickey, The Boston Globe