Word: client
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...CLIENT, an 11-year-old boy named Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) must get out of dire straits on his own because his father is long gone and his mother is slatternly and foolish. In Angels in the Outfield, an 11-year-old boy named Roger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is left in a foster home by his feckless father and requires the intervention of a heavenly host to help him. In North, an 11- year-old boy named North (Elijah Wood) becomes so disaffected from his parents that he chooses "free agency" and spends the rest of the picture trying...
...that score, the producers can probably relax about The Client. Of the boys of this summer, Mark Sway is the most interesting. He's a sort of updated Huck Finn. Mark is smart, self-reliant and deeply suspicious of grownups ) -- with good reason, as it turns out. Out in the woods, smoking cigarettes stolen from Mom, he encounters a man in the process of committing suicide. Trying (and failing) to prevent it -- the sequence is good and scary -- Mark learns where a certain very interesting body is buried...
...Sword's attorney, Robert Canty Sr., told the Boston Globe that the $12,000 figure his client was indicted for stealing "sounds a little high...
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...
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...