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Terror's AdvocateA weirdly nonjudgmental movie about a lawyer who never met a terrorist he wouldn't defend.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007, at 6:34 PM ET

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But if Vergès' eyes are dead when he talks about justice or truth, they light up when he talks about women. And food. Vergès left Djamila Bouhired and their two children in 1970, disappearing for eight years that are still unaccounted for today. After his reappearance, he fell in love with Magdalena Kopp, member of the German RZ and lover of Carlos. Vergès seems rather uninterested in her radical cause but recalls with delight the "smoked country ham" and ice cream with Armagnac he snuck into prison during his visits with Kopp. And each of his stories seems to contain at least one pit stop for cheese.

This seems almost trivial until a friend describes Vergès as someone who would have probably been a terrorist himself, were it not for the fact that he liked good food and books too much. "If he could have pressed a button and blown things up, he'd have done it," observes his buddy. But Vergès was not one to sleep in cellars and eat out of tins. Becoming terror's advocate allowed Vergès to blow up his cake and eat it, too.

Vergès should have learned the same lesson eventually understood by romantics everywhere: No love is perfect, no cause is pure, and even fine foods go rancid. Schroeder's movie reminds us of this fact constantly, as he parades one paunchy, balding, '60's-era European bomb-thrower after another for interviews about their gory glory days. The once-smoldering Magdalena Kopp looks exhausted and ill-used as she struggles to explain her participation in a Paris bombing attempt in 1982. H.J. Klein, an operative in the hostage-taking at a Vienna meeting of OPEC ministers in 1975, looks to be both insane and on death's door as he describes his decision to renounce terrorism. Even Carlos himself—interviewed via telephone from Clairvaux prison, where he is serving a life sentence—sounds old and bitter; less jackal than mutt. As it turns out, yesterday's freedom fighter is today's bitter, elderly ex-con.

Unlike his famous clients, Vergès himself seems to have aged little and changed not at all in the 50 years since he fell in love with Djamila, Algeria, and people who blow up other people in the name of some cause. Now 82, but looking 20 years younger, the devil's advocate sits through most of his interviews behind a plush desk, waving a cigar, and looking for all the world like a smug Bond villain, stroking his invisible cat. Chuckling his way through one old war story after another, Jacques Vergès (that's "Uncle Jacques" to Carlos' children) could, at first, be any old lawyer, reliving his finest closing arguments and cross examinations. You have to listen closely to really register that this particular old lawyer thinks Pol Pot was guilty only of "unintentional genocide"; that Pot's victims could not possibly have numbered in the millions; and that even if his client did some rotten things, wasn't the American bombardment of Cambodia really to blame?

Terror's Advocate has little to tell us about the moral universe of those who defend the horribly evil, simply because Vergès has little to say about morality. But in introducing us to a lawyer who thinks of the law simply as great theater—something to be enjoyed with a good cognac and a cigar—the film is devastating. Jacques Vergès' clients may be sad and wrinkled, dead or on death row, and his Djamila long-forgotten. But their attorney ends the movie with an offer to defend anyone, "even George Bush." Not because everyone deserves a zealous defense, but because it's amusing to win cases by insulting the justice system. Unencumbered by any lofty ideas about justice and law, Vergès believes only in putting on a great production, in winning, and in his own infallibility. He is every ethical lawyer's worst nightmare. And every terrorist's dream.