Robert Downey Jr. wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Deep Sea Chronograph

David Dobkin's The Judge (2014) sends Robert Downey Jr. back to small-town Indiana as Hank Palmer, a slick Chicago defense lawyer who has not spoken to his family in years. His father, the town judge, stands accused of killing a man, and Hank, who usually wins cases for people who can afford him, ends up defending the one man he never wanted to. The film is about filiation, about the moment a child becomes the parent to his own aging parent.

On Hank's wrist is a Jaeger-LeCoultre Deep Sea Chronograph, a dive chronograph with a matte black dial and two sunken subdials, styled after the 1959 Memovox Deep Sea, the first dive watch Jaeger-LeCoultre ever built. The look is deliberately vintage, 1960s skin-diver, though the chronograph movement inside is modern and made in-house. Downey did not need persuading. He has been a Jaeger-LeCoultre ambassador for years, which is why the brand keeps appearing on his wrist, on screen and off.

It is the right watch for the character. Hank Palmer is precise, expensive, and used to being the sharpest man in any room, and the Deep Sea is precise and expensive without shouting about it. Then the movie strands him in a town where none of that helps, in his father's house, at his father's trial. The watch stays exactly what it is. Hank does not.