AP
Muhammad Ali in 1971, the year the Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft-dodging.
The premise gets your attention: Muhammad Ali’s greatest fight was one in which he never threw a punch.
It makes more sense once you realize that “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight” is a dramatized version, and a fascinating one, of how the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 overturned Ali’s conviction for draft-dodging.
The film doesn’t have the visceral appeal of Ali’s three fights with Joe Frazier or the “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman. In fact, Ali appears in the movie only via archival footage.
But there’s no less ferocity in the struggle between the court’s conservatives, who saw Ali’s refusal to serve as a jab in the face of America, and its liberals, who maintained that his refusal to fight was rooted in sincerely held Muslim beliefs.
The conservatives, led by Chief Justice Warren Burger (Frank Langella), at first assume they won’t even have to hear the appeal.
But a young law clerk named Kevin Connolly (Benjamin Walker) starts bulldogging the case, first persuading his boss, Justice John Harlan (Christopher Plummer), to hear it and then finding a legal smoking gun.
Meanwhile, we’re watching the interplay among the justices, both concerning this case and in the more general day-to-day operations.
Who knew, for instance, that every Friday afternoon the justices went to the basement to watch porno movies, on the nominal premise that they might have to hear an obscenity case someday?
The Court generally gets respect from the film, though individuals aren’t always flatteringly portrayed. Thurgood Marshall (Danny Glover) doesn’t come off as very attuned, while Burger harbors residual racial stereotypes like the assumption all blacks have a way with gardening.
Whether the film gets all the nuances right is hard for civilians to say. But round for round, the fight is surprisingly lively.
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