AfFirmative Action
For a lot of male middle-schoolers in 1992, The Firm, along with maybe Jurassic Park or the latest Stephen King novel, was the entry point to the world of adult bestsellers, critically ignored books that were still so much cooler than To Kill a Mockingbird. The best way to understand The Firm is to compare it to the film version. I remember being disappointed with the movie. It may have been the first page-to-screen adaptation I’ve ever eagerly anticipated, and I concluded—perhaps inevitably—that it wasn’t as good as the book. That’s an assessment that I’ve revised after rereading the book and rewatching the movie: The film isn’t worse than the book, it’s just a lot less misogynist.
The changes made by the filmmakers show how niche-oriented Grisham’s novel is and explain the book’s monumental success. The book is an unabashed male fantasy, where women’s most—usually, only—distinguishing characteristics are either their legs, their chest or their unattractiveness (it is observed that the receptionists at Bendini, Lambert & Locke “seem kind of plump”). Our hero, Mitch McDeere, cheats on his wife Abby (who, by the way, has “long, brown legs”), never tells her and never receives any kind of reprimand or comeuppance for it.
The movie was directed by Oscar-winning Hollywood veteran Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, Out of Africa); it grossed over $250 million worldwide and garnered two Oscar nominations and favorable reviews. It contorts to make the McDeeres’ relationship at least somewhat balanced. Mitch (Tom Cruise) confesses to Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) about his Cayman Islands tryst. She achieves some measure of movie-style retribution by not telling her hubby whether or not she slept with his boss (Gene Hackman) while she stole files from him. Of course, she didn’t—equality has its limits and no woman will make a cuckold out of Tom Cruise.
The book’s ending is jarringly shoddy in its treatment of Abby. Rather than enter the witness protection program, Mitch steals millions from the Mafia (the eponymous firm’s true owners) and makes plans to spend the rest of his life sailing the Caribbean with Abby and his brother Ray. Abby has left her career, her family and even her dog behind her. Mitch, on the other hand, has brought his brother—the only relative he speaks to—with him and he has already abandoned his career. Abby’s fear that the Mafia will retaliate against her family is assuaged rather dubiously. And though there are worse things than sailing the Caribbean with millions in the bank, the reader is left wondering what type of life the children Abby has always wanted will have as the boat-confined scions of fugitives.
Abby makes sacrifices, Mitch doesn’t, and that’s the way things should be: “I’ll be okay Mitch,” Abby says, kissing him on the cheek. “As long as we’re together, I can handle anything.” The film radically changes the ending so that Mitch and Abby merely have to leave town and Mitch has to look for a more modest law job. It’s not the happy-for-Mitch, crappy-for-Abby conclusion that Grisham seems to believe is good enough for the wife.
The contrast between the novel and the film can be explained in the difference between the book business and the movie business. Hardcover rights to The Firm sold for $200,000, and just 30,000 copies were printed. Bookselling is by its nature a niche industry: a book doesn’t have to appeal to all demographics—if it hits one target well enough, it can be profitable. Just as Danielle Steele doesn’t have to worry about whether men will like her book, Grisham, who wanted to get out of lawyering and start making money off his writing, didn’t have to concern himself with treating his female characters well. The film, on the other hand, with a budget of $42 million and one of the world’s biggest movie stars, could not afford to be so cavalier in its treatment of half its potential audience.
Steamy adulterous sex without consequences, a beautiful wife whose feelings and needs also don’t amount to anything: this was a world that an adolescent guy—and, judging by the book’s success, guys of all ages—wanted to read about and see faithfully represented onscreen. What I hadn’t realized when I walked out of The Firm and said that it wasn’t as good as the book was that the things that made it so appealing to my pubescent male mind had been systematically compromised by the mass-market economics of Hollywood.