lawyer

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’ve said before how much I enjoy films about institutional cover-ups and the legal and media process of uncovering them. Hadn’t got round to this one until now. My librarian tendencies will show when I say that the best parts are the archive-digging ones: church directories, the euphemisms in the personnel listings (sick leave, unassigned), four reporters slowly working out just how many names that adds up to. Ruffalo gives Rezendes the right kind of intensity. McAdams does things with greater calm but no less well. Liev Schreiber plays Marty Baron at roughly half the volume of anyone else in the room, and makes me wonder why we don’t see much more of him in big-screen roles.

The plot creaks and Cruise does his earnest-sprinter routine, but the real pleasure is watching Pollack assemble the deepest supporting cast of the decade. Hackman (weary, rueful), Hal Holbrook’s avuncular menace, Ed Harris doing more with a sigh or a “fuck!” than most leads manage with a monologue, Holly Hunter stealing twenty minutes outright, plus Strathairn, Brimley, Busey, Tobin Bell, Sorvino, Dean Norris: every door that opens, someone you recognise walks through.