Cinema
The Client (`15', selected cinemas)
A legal sweetener
Mark Steyn
Truth isn't stranger than fiction, it's just less sentimental. In real life, tarts don't have hearts — and indeed, to many of their clients, that's part of their appeal. Similar- ly, the lawyer/client relationship baffles Hollywood because, by definition, it's not emotionally motivated. Recently, for exam- ple, I met Alan Dershowitz, one of O.J. Simpson's phalanxes of superstar attorneys. I happen to believe, for what it's worth, that O.J. went out that night and killed his wife, but I was struck by the way Der- showitz and the other hotshots' ferocious conduct of the defence has been criticised as 'immoral'. Morality doesn't come into it: the relationship is strictly amoral; as Der- showitz has had to explain patiently, a lawyer serves his client to the best of his ability simply because he is his client and thus justice is seen to be done (and he has the money: Bob Shapiro is getting 600 bucks an hour from O.J. and I figure the rate for Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey is even higher). To wonder whether Der- showitz believes in Simpson's innocence, or even likes the guy, or is planning a few post-acquittal rounds of golf with him, is to trivialise and demean a uniquely intense relationship.
In a tabloid society, alas, everything has to be fitted to television movie formulae. Today, the screenwriter and the lawyer per- form largely the same function: they take the harmless, banal cruelties of life and apply some sappy sentimental daytime talk-show psychobabble coating to them. The Menendez brothers killed their par- ents — and got off; Lorena Bobbitt sliced off her husband's penis — and got off; and only the other day, a trucker came home, found his wife in bed with another man, thought about it, had a few drinks and four hours later killed her — and received 18 months: their attorneys had successfully smothered the case in pop-therapy syrup.
It's a favourite Hollywood technique. But, in Joel Schumacher's The Client, adapted from John Grisham's bestseller, it's the lawyer who drowns in syrup. Some trailer trash kid speaks to a Mafia mouth- piece before the guy blows his brains out; now both the mob and the FBI are after him. The reason any attorney would want the case is obvious: the boy's front-page news; he's your ticket out of that legal aid backwater. But economic self-interest isn't enough for the movies: Ms Reggie Love, trainee lawyer and ex-lush, accepts the case to atone for her neglect of her own kids, long ago removed from her custody, and because young Mark has suffered at the hands of an alcoholic parent. When her mother points out that 'he's your client, Regina, not your kid', Reggie says 'He's never had a break and he's counting on me.' Instead of the tart with a heart, it's the lip with a tip, ever ready to help her pint- sized client with an Oprah-sized aphorism: `Sometimes being strong means asking for help.'
Among the legal thriller boys, John Grisham is no Scott Turovi, but his novel did have a few telling details: Reggie's estranged kids are, respectively, a gaolbird and a junkie, and, in the Love household, they are spoken of without love. In the film version, that's all gone. Instead, having mis- placed some brief or other, Reggie stum- bles across an old baseball glove and baby shoes, and the gloomy symphonic score goes into overdrive. Furthermore, Reggie is Susan Sarandon, the apotheosis of tart- with-heart tough vulnerability. The moment she totters on, her shopworn sexi- ness squeezed unconvincingly into a suit, she fatally weakens the movie.
It's a pity. The kid, Brad Renfro, is like- ably unlikeable, his face locked permanent- ly in a petulant sneer; the welfare mom, Mary-Louise Parker, is sullen and resilient. Outside, in what passes for the real world, mobsters have no compunction about killing kids. But you never feel Mark or his mother are in any real danger. Once Miss Sarandon and the incidental music show up, The Client stops being about plot and strategy and avoiding being killed and turns into a self-esteem support group learning experience. No wonder the public prefers to follow O.J. and Lorena and co. Holly- wood today is reluctant to admit the possi- bility of all but a few stock character relationships. Like English common law, movies are based on precedent.
Theatre
Follies (Leicester Haymarket) Romeo Und Julia (Barbican)
Wherefore art thou?
Sheridan Morley
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