Word: grisham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Client," also set in the South, just didn't take the movie-going audience by storm like its predecessor "The Firm." We'll have to see if Grisham's next film, "The Chamber" proves to be any better...
Director Joel Schumacher has made the most successful movie yet of a John Grisham novel. Its acting is the best, its paranoia and its plotting are fairly plausible and, despite its obligations to thriller conventions, it says something pretty truthful about what it's like to be young and neglected these days. Finally, in Brad Renfro the filmmakers have a real find -- a tough, appealing kid whose instinct is not to beg for sympathy but to let it accrue to him naturally...
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...
...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...