inspirational

In the pantheon of 90s Grisham adaptations this one sits in the middle, some way below The Firm. The cast is overstuffed and even 135 minutes isn’t enough to find work for all of them. Voight is good value as Drummond, full of expensive false courtesy, and DeVito might be the best thing in it as Deck, the paralegal who keeps failing the bar. Claire Danes is good too, stuck in a subplot with no route back to the insurance case; the film keeps setting the trial down to go and check on Kelly Riker. The rest is genre-by-numbers, and it’s no surprise I forgot that I’d already seen it until I was a fair way in.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.