Schumacher Continues 'Firm'

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway's accidental involvement in the suicide of a New Orleans Mafia lawyer leads him to "all kinds of trouble" in the first chapter of John Grisham's "The Client." In producer Joel Schumacher's adaptation of the novel (also "The Client"), however, it is the screenplay's disinvolvement from the opening-scene suicide and its "bloody and explosive secret" that causes the film "all kinds of trouble."

With a cast that features Susan Sarandon ("Bull Durham," "Thelma and Louise") and Tommy Lee Jones '69 ("The Fugitive"), along with a terrific debut performance from 10-year-old Tennessee street kid Brad Renfro, it would seem that Schumacher couldn't go wrong. Nevertheless, the director's painfully close adherence to the Grisham script fails to inspire.

In a summer which has presented surprisingly few of the requisite mediocre-but-big-box-office sequels, "The Client" perhaps comes closest to fitting the bill. Interestingly, the film suffers most, not in its attempt to mix new elements into a proven formula (Grisham does attempt to give his novel an original setting and a fresh narrative), but rather in its attempt to college formulaic material into an exciting new story.

The opening scene of "The Client" shows Mark (Brad Renfro) teaching his eight-year-old brother Ricky (David Speck) how to smoke behind a trailer-park outside Memphis. Only a few smokes later, Mark has a chance encounter with the suicidal lawyer, Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz), that sweeps his family into a plot of Mafia intrigue, federal investigation, and a legal battle who outcome may determine the family's future. Sound like a compelling beginning?

While the sequence could potentially jumpstart the otherwise lackluster Grisham plot (and comes close to doing so in the novel), Schumacher's roadster fails to start. Launching instead into an expatiated look at the Sway family and their unsolicited entanglement with the local authorities, a New Orleans crime family, and ultimately the federal justice system, Schumacher delivers a slowed-down, scaled-down production which loses its inspiration almost as soon as Clifford takes his own life.

With the Mafia lawyer's suicide, Grisham begins "The Client" where he ends "The Firm." The author presents us with another Memphis legal story with the familiar players: the Government, the Mafia, their legal representatives, and the young hero with the damning evidence who successfully takes on the other three. Has Grisham's genius matured in "The Client"?

Jerome Clifford's creative death scene in the opening chapter seems tantamount to Grisham confessing that nothing more can be written about the tainted attorneys of "The Firm" and the crime network they represented; indeed, the author labors nearly 564 pages convincing us he is not simply writing another legal thriller. Instead of the brilliant young lawyer, Mitch McDeer (played by Tom Cruise in "The Firm"), the novel's hero is a cigarette-smoking 11-year-old; in place of the Firm's boardroom, the setting is working-class Memphis. Nevertheless, the similarities remain, and Grisham ultimately leaves the reader with a heavily dramatized Southern family saga spliced into a patchwork of legal confrontations and cliched Mafia tough-talk.

If Grisham's attempt to distance his novel from The Firm's slick legal plot actually compromises the novel's success, Schumacher's pious adherence to the dramatic material of the novel--the Sway melodrama--significantly reduces "The Client"'s suspense potential. By the time Jones first appears (almost 15 minutes into the film as U.S. District Attorney Roy Foltrigg), we are beginning to wonder whether the "explosive secret" that Mark has learned is really important or whether the local authorities simply find the kid a good person to harass. With Jones on the screen as the ambitious and disgustingly smooth Foltrigg, the film comes briefly to life and the plot begins to fall into place. Foltrigg's underdeveloped part, however, fails to exploit the talents of Jones, who flourished in a similar role in "The Fugitive."

Like Mark Sway, who takes on the federal authorities and the Mafia almost singlehandedly, Schumacher seems to think he can shoot 30 minutes of film without his supporting cast.

Happily, with the entrance of Foltrigg, Mark decides he needs an attorney to take on the feds, and Schumacher finally concedes to bring in Sarandon as the reformed-alcoholic/renegade lawyer, Reggie Love. In her strong portrayal, Sarandon turns a moderately interesting part into "The Client"'s highlight performance, occasional showing the impressive depth she captured in "Thelma and Louise." Had Schumacher fully exploited Sarandon's hard-ball verbal confrontations, "The Client" might have succeed ed as a fast-paced courtroom drama; unfortunately, Schumacher fails to commit to the dynamic court plot, preferring to interstice the Sway family drama with a few dismally unoriginal mob scenes.

Barry "the Blade" Moldanno (Anthony La Paglia), the feared mobster whose knife inspires Jerome Clifford to commit suicide before Barry can kill him is, as his Mafia-kingpin uncle says, "stupid." Reducing criminal intrigue to a new level of sleaze and triteness, Moldanno adds almost nothing to a plot which pertains to him only in the murder he committed before the film begins.

Nevertheless, Schumacher periodically inserts Moldanno and his men in static scenes of insults and accusations, several of which only incoherently relate to the film.

After suffering through Barry's aesthetically empty performance from much of the film, we anticipate a quick, perhaps violent, resolution; "The Client" could have succeeded as a suspense-drama in the style of "Witness" (from which some of its story seems to be based). Schumacher opts instead to leave his resolution off-screen, giving us the satisfaction of neither Foltrigg's victory nor Moldanno's arraignment. Even the Sway's story is questionably resolved; Ricky, who lapsed into a traumatic coma after witnessing Clifford's suicide, remains comatose during the closing credits--perhaps symbolic of the film itself.