TORONTO, Canada: “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr. has shed his box-office-busting superhero suit to take on a quiet family drama in the Toronto film festival opener “The Judge,” but got little love from critics Friday.

In the film, which represents a return to his roots in dramatic roles, Downey Jr plays a slick Chicago defense lawyer who heads back to his Indiana hometown.

There, he must defend his father — a prominent judge played by Robert Duvall — in a murder trial, despite their bitterly dysfunctional relationship. The movie “isn’t one of the big tempo (films) which Robert and I have been living in for a while,” his wife Susan, one of the film’s producers, told reporters at the festival, the largest in North America.

“Our hope is that this will get us going on that conversation of ‘can we put out movies about real people’,” she said, adding that it was inspired by older studio films with “just people talking.”