The Client
First screened in the mid 1990s / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Joel Schumacher. Cast: Brad Renfro, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, David Speck, J.T. Walsh, Will Patton, Anthony LaPaglia, Ron Dean, Kim Coates, John Diehl, William Richert, Anthony Edwards, Bradley Whitford, Anthony Heald, Ossie Davis, Micole Mercurio, Kimberly Scott, Amy Hathaway. Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman and Robert Getchell (based on the novel by John Grisham). VOR:①
Schumacher & Co. understood the assignment well enough to make a pile of cash and deliver an entertainment. As anything like art, it's negligible.
I do miss the days when actors who needed to renovate a home or build a new deck, or maybe subsidize a passion project like Dead Man Walking or Cobb, didn't have to tuck into a superhero movie. For a brief but high-flying stretch, you could instead bring your celebrity, your stage training, or your whiteness to a John Grisham adaptation. Once there, you could play a lawyer, a perp, a defendant, an accessory, a colorful witness, a sinister witness, a contract killer, a legal secretary, a dipsomaniacal mentor, a passerby who saw or overheard something odd, a neighbor who failed to see or hear the odd thing, a district attorney, a bad cop, a cop who stands between the main characters and the people with protest signs, an abuser, a northerner's stereotype of Southernness, a southerner's stereotype of Southernness, Brenda Fricker's idea of Southernness, someone at a microfiche machine, or a wife being sent off to stay at her mother's till things die down. (If you were a black actor, with maybe two exceptions, and you needed to at least pay for some new tires, you could sometimes be in the second row of either the assembled courtroom team or the assembled hit squad, or you could be a nurse or a prison guard born without a larynx, or you could shake your head and go mmm-mmm at a desolate child or at white criminy, or you could maybe play a judge, or Julia Roberts's leading man and monastic non-love interest, or you could.... well, maybe we'll talk about A Time to Kill some other day.)
It's important to say that the Grisham movies were not automatically better than superhero movies, although they always looked like better movies. The burnish was in! Any glance at any frame of The Firm or The Pelican Brief or A Time to Kill or The Rainmaker (or, hypothetically, The Chamber, though I'm unclear if anyone saw it) was like looking at a whole wall of floor-to-ceiling volumes of leatherbound case history. Expensive Seriousness was very clearly taking place. The Client in some ways emblematizes the project of Grisham on Screen. It's like a car for which every imported part cost top dollar, designed for a connoisseurial experience behind the wheel, so you wonder why the driver is mostly opting for cruise control.
Unlike the other Grishams, which err on the side of sluggishness, The Client moves to its advantage and disadvantage at a quick clip, particularly in its middle. The opening half-hour reprises virtually every particular of Grisham's setup chapters, with Sorcerer's Stone levels of scrupulous if unimaginative fidelity. At that point, things kick into higher gear, zipping past most of what's halfway interesting in the book: the main kid's see-sawing pleasure and misery in the eye of this sudden-onset storm, the vexed political history of the murder victim, the strained camaraderie and petty dick-measuring among feds, cops, judges, and lawyers who mostly get flattened here into interchangeable white guys in suits.
I'd say that everything becomes plot plot plot, but even that feels like an almost secondary interest. Imagine passing through the turnstile of a GrishamWorld theme park but soon realizing it's only 22 minutes till closing time, so you gotta sprint through it. There's a jail cell! There's the humid Southern soil, steaming in the blue of the night! There's an over-emphatic shaft of light through a window blind! There's someone crouching below the passenger's-side dashboard to be smuggled to safety! There's Anthony LaPaglia in a mesh sleeveless top and black leather pants straight out of Cruising! (Wait, what?)
The filmmaking itself suggests that "There's no time for that!!" was a cry often heard on this set. In fact, scratch the lacquer even a little, and you can't not notice the feeble craft of this thing. A huge number of dialogue scenes, which are 80% of what Grisham movies are, have been rendered as shot/reverse exchanges of actors in separate close-ups, who usually seem like they were on set at the same time, but sometimes you wonder. This is most conspicuous in scenes involving 11-year-old first-timer Brad Renfro, who brings plenty of punchy spirit to the main character (you see why they cast him) but no actual technique. He may have needed any number of takes before hitting a minor's maximum hours of shooting per day. Easier, I'm sure, to give him all the tries required and then shoot the adult's coverage later—or, maybe, wrap early with the adult so they could go home, but keep working with Renfro till he got it right?
Or maybe it's not that deep, since Schumacher and his unit directors tilt pretty "point and shoot" with most scenes, no matter who's in them. Not an unreasonable visual strategy for Grisham, I guess, but since mood and visual flamboyance have been the relative saviors of other Schumacher vehicles (Flatliners is an obvious example), it's too bad to see him working up to "bigger" projects while tamping down the (good) things that set him apart. Meanwhile, Howard Shore's score is easily among his worst, and the handful of howler costumes on LaPaglia, Renfro, and others unfortunately give a bad name to the solid, subtly persuasive daywear and quietly character-specific lawyer garb elsewhere.
That The Client is memorable at all is down to Susan Sarandon, zestily filling the contours of her character without seeming too pressed about it, and Tommy Lee Jones, somehow playing the least cardboard antagonist and the poker-faced comic foil. He purloins some scenes that belonged to other men in the book, including major rivals, which is part of why his role eventually stops making sense; still, you're never sorry you're watching him. Sarandon and Jones pretty clearly have their most fun on the few occasions when they get to act with/against each other, but even in dodgier script passages or when saddled with wayward scene partners (poor women everywhere thank you for your condescension, Mary-Louise Parker!), they never seem above the material, either. Both are working at all times to make The Client a good version of itself, without pretending that what they're serving is anything other than fast food. You could say the same for a couple well-cast dependables in tertiary roles, like Will Patton, Ossie Davis, and J.T. Walsh. But for a cast this size and with this level of median résumé, after The Client if not before, that list oughta be longer.
Overall, I like that The Client doesn't feel heavy in the ways that The Firm or The Pelican Brief often do. But I guess this nostalgia ride into pleasingly Marvel-less, effects-free 90s summer cinema also serves as a bit of a check on that same nostalgia. The movies that read as more "adult" weren't always, and though they weren't animated, if you ran a DNA analysis on some of them, you might discover that their closest relatives were cartoons. Grade:C
