Vin Diesel, of all people, turns in a surprisingly nuanced performance as New Jersey gangster Jackie DiNorscio, a real-life character who defended himself in court during the longest Mafia trial in U.S. history. With his teddy bear-grin and charming, comical patter, he's the tortoise who trumps the more experienced hares. Jackie's schtick is that everyone likes him; when that works, he smiles and smiles, but when it doesn't, he allows a genuine confused hurt to creep into his eyes.
Apparently based on court transcripts, half the job is already done for Lumet and his cowriters, T.J. Mancini and Robert J. McCrea. They merely fill in the character gaps by depicting a few key evenings and lunches between court dates, and it works spectacularly.
Lumet gets a great deal of help from actors like Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) as a crafty lawyer assigned to the mobsters, and Ron Silver as the stern but humane judge. Annabella Sciorra has one moving scene as Jackie's ex-wife. From his early days on live TV, Lumet knows how to keep the action moving within a limited space. He keeps the courtroom sequences on a visual plane, using high and low shots to emphasize power or defeat, and angles to show the course of the trial going unexpectedly off-kilter.
The film's major flaw is the one-note, haranguing prosecutor (Linus Roache), who quickly brings audience sympathy to the gangster's side. Indeed, it can be disconcerting to find oneself rooting for the so-called bad guys—especially guys who more or less existed in real life—and many of the film's harshest critics have taken the film to task for this.
Yet, unlike message movies that tell you how to assign "good" and "bad," Find Me Guilty forces audiences to ask what happens when the bad guys win, as they so often do in real life.