'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.