The Gingerbread Man
First screened and reviewed in March 1998 / Most recently screened in January 2025
Director: Robert Altman. Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Embeth Davidtz, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Daryl Hannah, Famke Janssen, Tom Berenger, Mae Whitman, Jesse James. Screenplay: "Al Hayes," aka John Grisham, before demanding his name be removed. In Brief:
Hokum plot, hokier accents, but Altman brings some edge and energetic camera behavior to an airport-read tale.
VOR:③
The minute you start selling The Geningerbread Man, you're likely overselling it, but remember when flapjack scripts motivated zesty style exercises?
Standard John Grisham fare in which a "brilliant" Southern lawyer of already-questionable moral fiber is thrown into a cyclone of trickeries and deceptions, elevated into legitimate cinema by the reliable touch of director Robert Altman. Altman knows we're bored by now with all the lawyerisms and faux-epiphanies of
the Grisham films (though The Gingerbread Man is original to the screen, not a book adaptation) and instead concentrates on evoking the mossy, wild bewitchments of Savannah, Georgia, that completely eluded Clint Eastwood's lead-bellied Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Vibrant performances from Kenneth Branagh and the increasingly promising Embeth Davidtz keep the story moving along, and the cinematography of Farewell My Concubine's Gu Changwei is a special treat.
In other words, there was no reason for this film to have died at the box office as it did, and—in what may be the direct cause of that unfortunate failure—there was no reason for the producing studio to dump the film into the January doldrums and show so little confidence in the picture. Don't let the film's
negative reputation, or lack of any reputation at all, dissuade you from renting. It won't change your life or show you anything you haven't seen, but it will shake up the same old ingredients into a percolating couple of hours that rarely lag and hold together tightly until a somewhat protracted, Cape Fear-type dénouement aboard a boat. Till then, smooth sailing, folks. Grade:B–
