The Courtroom

Lee Sunday Evans’ The Courtroom, premiering at the 2022 Tribeca Festival, is a powerful and timely stage adaptation that digs into the nuts and bolts of the deportation process.  The film opens with on-screen text informing the audience that the dialogue is taken verbatim from court transcripts.  Given the anti-immigrant sentiment that came to a fever pitch in the last administration, the film is still depressingly relevant.  The somberness of the material is balanced by clever direction that keeps the material from ever feeling stagey. For those willing to listen to dialogue that’s literally all court jargon, this is a highly rewarding film to watch.

The movie opens on an immigration court hearing from November 17, 2008.  Elizabeth Keathley (an excellent Kristin Villanueva), a Filipina immigrant, is being accused of illegally voting in a congressional election.  Her lawyer, Richard Hanus (Linda Powell, in a bit of gender-swapped casting), argues that when Elizabeth went to get a driver’s license, she was tricked into registering to vote in a process called entrapment by estoppel. The first part of the film centers on this immigration hearing, as a terrified, overwhelmed Elizabeth must fend off questioning from the opposing counsel (Michael Braun) and a judge who values bureaucracy over the individual (Marsha Stephanie Blake, also gender-swapped). Meanwhile, her loving husband (Michael Chernus, sympathetic and affecting) looks on from the sidelines and testifies on her behalf. The rest of the film follows the fallout of this deportation case, with the action later shifting to an appeals court several years later and finally to a citizenship ceremony. (When the action shifts to 2017, it may very well produce a sense of unease, with all the connotations of the then-active administration coming to mind.)

The original Off-Broadway play, in an intriguing gambit, never performed on an actual stage; rather, performances were held in active courtrooms in New York.  In this film adaptation, Evans smartly has relocated the action to a stage rather than a courtroom, and has no qualms about highlighting the artificiality.  Each scene is notable for its incomplete set dressing. The opening shots of the film are startling as it opens on a threadbare courtroom set.  Save for the witness stand and the judge’s seat, the actors are framed by darkness. (It’s easy for one to imagine audience members sat behind them, watching intently.) This clever set design embraces the material’s theatrical origins in a way that even the original production didn’t.  It also provides a bit of cognitive dissonance, as there’s a heightened contrast between the stagey set up and the powerful, at times dense, courtroom discussions taking place.

At the same time, the direction and acting are so stellar that the film manages to not feel stagey, despite its overt theatrical trappings. Evans, with admirable restraint, employs close-ups at key moments, ensuring that the proceedings feel fresh and vital. When one of the lawyers asks the husband why he didn’t stop her from voting, it cuts to a close-up shot of his face as he looks away, clearly full of regret and guilt.  The close-ups are employed seldom enough—much of the film consists of medium and wide shots--that they’re noticeable, and highlight the character’s inner turmoil. The benefit of any stage-to-film adaptation is the ability to use camerawork to provide a greater sense of immediacy than can be gained in the theater. But it’s never been more of a boon than it is here.  (Hamilton, eat your heart out.)

Even while dispensing the intermittently dense legal jargon, the actors masterfully portray their characters’ inner state with just a glance or a mannerism.  Elizabeth, clearly overwhelmed by a system she doesn’t understand, nervously fiddles with her necklace on the witness stand.  Similarly, when Elizabeth starts crying during cross-examination, Braun plays the opposing counsel as physically uncomfortable, sympathetic but powerless to help. There’s still room for impassioned monologues, particularly by Mr. Hanus, but even these are done with impressive restraint and, again, never make the film feel too stagey. (How often does someone in real life, in a fit of passion, deliver a blistering monologue that succinctly and eloquently conveys their issues?) Powell is masterful in these monologues, serving as a stand-in for the audience and pleading with quiet rage for the bureaucracy to take pity on her client, an immigrant who was only trying to achieve the American Dream, whatever that is.

The film’s overall effect is quite unsettling, as common sense and decency are trumped by bureaucracy and Elizabeth struggles to remain in America. Evans has smartly broken this story into three distinct segments to allow the audience to discover the eventual outcome of Elizabeth’s deportation struggle. Despite the dryness of the dialogue, this story will put the audience through the emotional wringer. The initial immigration court scene is devastating as the odds are increasingly stacked against Elizabeth. A prolonged discussion over whether she needs an interpreter (her native language is Visayan, a dialect of Tagalog) raises doubts as to whether she even understands what’s being asked of her. The second scene, at the appeals court, is somewhat less effective, as it features only Mr. Hanus and a panel of judges.  However, Powell gets to do some of her best work in this scene, delivering a fiery speech and pleading with the U.S. government to take the side of the immigrant rather than the bureaucracy.  The third and final scene, at the naturalization ceremony, is the only one that rings  false. B.D. Wong shows up to deliver a speech about his judge character’s immigrant upbringing, but it feels too scripted to have any emotional impact.  This, combined with the close-ups of the various immigrants raising their hands during the pledge, feels like a bit of disingenuous hoo-rah jingoism that’s at odds with the rest of the movie.  I get that this closes Elizabeth’s arc, but it was somewhat disquieting, and not in a good way. It also seems to firmly situate this movie’s politics in the liberal, not leftist, realm.

Yet despite the diminishing returns, this is a powerful film that works to demystify the deportation process.  This is clearly a subject near and dear to the filmmakers; the screenwriter, Arian Moayed (yes, Stewart from Succession) is himself an Iranian immigrant.  Elizabeth, like so many of us, is just trying to live her life as an American, and it’s heartbreaking when she realizes that her chosen country doesn’t have her best interests at heart.   At the end of the film, the obligatory end-credits photograph of the real-life people involved hits harder than most, because the audience has had a glimpse, albeit brief, into her struggle.