'The Client' has trouble with adaptation

'The Client' has trouble with adaptation

By Sean Cole

JAKARTA (JP): The Client couldn't lose. After John Grisham's
first two Mega Bestsellers" (The Firm and The Pelican Brief)
were turned into movies, everyone predicted that The Client had
no chance of failing.

Of course they were right. The book itself has been translated
into 31 languages and has sold over 60 million copies. Both The
Firm (starring Tom Cruise) and The Pelican Brief (Julia Roberts
and Denzel Washington) grossed near and upwards of US$100
million. It's a simple equation. John Grisham is quickly becoming
the Stephen King of the American legal system.

So, how much should we judge a film adaptation on its
faithfulness to its source? Should we see them as separate
entities? Surely a film should be able to stand on its own,
accessible to those who don't already know the story. As the
critic in August first's People magazine phrased it "For Grisham
fans, this is the real thing; for non-Grisham fans, to hell with
the book, just see the movie."

It is not easy to make a film from a book. One must go
through pages and pages of scenes and dialogue and somehow
parallel major narrative devices, on which the whole story hinges
-- visually. Unfortunately, this difficulty often shows up in the
end result, the film itself.

The Client has this problem and overall, the story on screen
is uninteresting and somewhat unbelievable. This could be the
fault of a combination of things.

Premise

The premise is interesting enough. Eleven-year-old Mark Sway
(Brad Refno) and his little brother Ricky (David Speck) are out
for a smoke in the Memphis woods. Here they witness someone
attempting suicide via carbon-monoxide poisoning. In trying to
stop him, Mark gets locked in the car with Jerome "Romey"
Clifford, a mob lawyer. Romey, very predictably, tells Mark mob
secrets that could get him killed (if he weren't being killed
already) and Mark, just as predictably, escapes. Romey kills
himself. Its all over the news. Suddenly an eleven-year-old has
the F.B.I., the Mafia, and famous District Attorney, Reverend Roy
Foltrigg (Tommy Lee Jones), known for quoting the Bible in court
and never losing a case, after him. Plus, his brother's in a
state of post-traumatic-stress-disorder and his mother has lost
her job. So he hires divorce lawyer Reggie Love (Susan Sarandon)
to protect his rights.

Now this story could have been made into either a gripping,
heart-shaking thriller or a single episode of Murder She Wrote.
The Client falls somewhere in between. Part of the problem is the
meting out of information, the pace. After beginning excellently
and having every move well-paced, believable, understandable (and
very suspenseful) in the forest, its a mad dash from then on.
The rushed, choppy quality of the movie appears to stem, again,
from the makers trying to fit a novel complete with setting,
conflict, climax and resolution into two hours.

Approach

Another difficulty is how the story was approached. Around
one fourth of the way through, the movie begins to come apart and
never seems to fully recover. The attempts at comedy within the
same exaggerated stylization appear more to be self-mockery.

Also, these somewhat funny, worst-scenario characters and
situations -- the stereotypical hounding reporter, the
stereotypical hounding lawyer, the stereotypical Mafia thug, etc.
-- coupled with serious, believable characters like Mark, Reggie,
Reverend Roy, Judge Harry Roosevelt (Ossie Davis, one of the best
parts of the film) makes it inconsistent and confused.

One is never sure what to take seriously and what to see as
purposefully ridiculous. The exaggerated quality seeps into the,
supposedly, dramatic scenes. Clearly, the makers should have
either chosen one approach or another.

Then there is the question of characterization and/or
performance of these characters. At this point, Tommy Lee Jones
(this film is only one of four projects he appears in this year
alone, the others include Blown Away, Natural Born Killers and
Blue Sky) and Susan Sarandon pretty much guarantee superb
performances.

Mary Louise Parker is fine as Mark's mother, it is her
children that are distracting. I don't like to speak ill of
child-actors, they are only beginning and are the low-boys-and-
girls on Hollywood's totem pole. But Brad Refno's mark appears to
get angry in the same way whenever he gets angry. His attempt at
conveying bitterness and rage escapes him weakly, his words
becoming whiny as he spits them out. But for all actors and
especially those that are children, one test is never enough.

From there we sink to Anthony LaPaglia's portrayal of Barry
"the Blade" Muldano. LaPaglia churns out a cliche' (at best)
waste-of-space, no-brained character who is upsetting in his
shallowness and open-shirt. It is actually a wonder that any of
these actors chose to work on this project. And, here, one cannot
justifiably say whether the performance problems stemmed more
from the actors, director, screen-writers or from Grisham
himself.

The common problem all of these films face is that their
dynamics are imposed. Chiefly, all that is included, all that can
be, are the major turning points of the story, the landmarks. So
what we are left with are a collection of major pieces of
dialogue, characters in heart-wrenching turmoil and/or happiness
with very little subtlety, very little in between. We are left
with a skeleton housed in nothing, no muscle or sinew or flesh.