Summer of '94: The Client
Susan Sarandon kids around.
I miss the days of the Grisham thriller. It was a short period, running from 1993 to 2003, and it only encompassed seven films1. Most were not great, but they were largely dependable. Sprinkled in between big-budget tent poles, these mid-budget thrillers featured surprising twists, a few chases and – most importantly – fantastic ensembles delivering big speeches. Even if the films were bad, you were usually guaranteed the joy of watching some of our greatest character actors chew into meaty legalese – heck, nearly half of them co-starred Gene Hackman, as close to a guarantee of a good time as you’re going to get.
First out of the gate was The Firm and, to be fair, every subsequent Grisham adaptation suffered from not being that movie, which is one of the great adult thrillers of the 1990s. Later that year saw Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington headlining The Pelican Brief. I told you, these casts were stacked — just look ahead to 1996’s A Time to Kill, which featured Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Spacey, Ashley Judd, and Oliver Platt, and starred a then largely unknown actor named Matthew McConaughey. For several glorious years, grown-ups could beat the heat and watch some of our greatest actors shout the law at each other. We used to be a proper nation.
Sandwiched between Pelican Brief and A Time to Kill was The Client. A sweaty, melodramatic thriller about an upstart lawyer protecting a kid against the mob and the FBI, it was another of Grisham’s early best-sellers. It’s a fast-paced page-turner, full of the usual Grisham assortment of kindhearted attorneys, self-centered bureaucrats and vicious mobsters. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is a classic airplane read, moving fast enough to keep your attention but light enough that you can periodically put it down to check your email.
And that’s probably a fair review of the movie. The Client lacks the energy and propulsion of The Firm and the explosive theatrics of A Time to Kill. But it’s fleet-footed and smart, and a cast led by Susan Sarandon and a post-Fugitive Tommy Lee Jones ensures that it’s never less than watchable, and often more than that. It’s a movie designed for TNT, able to grab a viewer who flips over during a commercial break and good enough that they’ll likely keep with it to the end.
Brad Renfro makes his acting debut as Mark Sway, a young boy who lives in a Memphis trailer park with his mom and little brother. One afternoon, when the boys head out to the woods to smoke some swiped cigarettes, they stumble across a man trying to kill himself in his car. When Mark tries to intervene, the man grabs him and pulls him into the car with him. He reveals himself to be Jerome Clifford, a New Orleans mob lawyer who literally knows where all the bodies are buried. Afraid that he’s about to be murdered by mobster Barry “The Blade” Muldano, the lawyer offs himself in front of Mark…but not before revealing the location of the body of a U.S. Senator who The Blade has killed.
Mark escapes and the police quickly put together that he and his brother – now in a coma after witnessing the traumatic event – were on the scene. That captures the attention of the press, most notably the fame-chasing U.S. Attorney “Reverend” Roy Foltrigg (Jones), who desperately wants to find the Senator’s body and put Muldano behind bars. But Mark knows that if he says a word, the mob will come after his family. So he does the only thing he feels he can do – scurries to find a lawyer who will take his case. He finds Reggie Love (Sarandon), a recovering alcoholic and scrappy attorney who is willing to take on her pint-sized client for a buck.
In the back half of his career, director Joel Schumacher became a bit of a punching bag. He’d follow up The Client with Batman Forever and mortally wound his reputation with Batman and Robin (he returned to Grisham to direct A Time to Kill in between). And while, to some, he’ll always be known as the man who put nipples on the Bat suit, it’s easy to forget that he was behind some genuinely interesting films, including the ‘80s classics The Lost Boys and Flatliners. In the ‘90s, he was making his move into grown-up thrillers, and The Client was preceded by the fascinating and controversial Falling Down (his post-Batman career also had its share of interesting swings, including 8mm, Tigerland and Phone Booth). And while The Client lacks the energy and anger of Falling Down, it still stands as proof that if Schumacher hadn’t given himself over to the blockbuster machine, he could have continued to crank out solid mid-budget dramas and thrillers for a long time.
His chief contribution seems to have been understanding when to get out of his actors’ way. The Client’s story might be ridiculous, but the script by Akiva Goldsman and Robert Getchell keeps it plausible with terse mob dialogue, arguments about obstruction of justice, and several scenes that revel in watching Reggie dismantle the plans of Rev. Roy. Sarandon would win an Oscar for the next year’s Dead Man Walking, but she had already established herself as one of our best actors. Reggie is quick-witted and funny, and Sarandon leans just enough into the character’s backstory to give her a touch of pathos and regret but without the wallowing with which today’s prestige shows would probably saddle the character. It’s great fun watching her go toe to toe with Jones, who plays Foltrigg as a more camera-loving, smooth-talking version of Sam Gerard, with a dash of Foghorn Leghorn tossed in for good measure. Rev. Roy is more obstacle than villain; he just wants to see justice done, but he’s not above skirting some ethical codes to get what he wants. Jones walks a fine line between likability and despicability with Rev. Roy, and somehow gives him a comeuppance that is both a bit of a redemption and a foil.
One of the pleasures of these Grisham adaptations is the deep bench of character actors and future stars that filled even the most minor roles. While The Client’s supporting cast doesn’t quite rival that of The Firm or A Time to Kill, it’s impressive nonetheless. I’d forgotten that Rev. Roy’s team also includes Bradley Whitford, Anthony Heald and J.T. Walsh (hilarious as an suck-up member of the Memphis FBI with an awful haircut). Reggie doesn’t have as big an entourage to follow her around, but ER’s Anthony Edwards shows up for a few scenes as her assistant. Will Patton is solid as a slimy police officer eager to torment Mark, Ossie Davis brings decency by shorthand as a local judge, Kim Coates terrifies as a mob thug, and Willam H. Macy pops in for a few minutes as a doctor. Dan Castellantea – Homer Simpson himself – plays a scum-sucking journalist. Plus, Anthony LaPaglia saunters around as a flashy dum-dum of a mob hitman.
Grisham had final approval over casting and pushed for Schumacher to hire an unknown actor to play Mark. Renfro more than holds his own against this stacked cast. His version of the character lacks the survival instinct that the Mark of the book has, but brings a chip on his shoulder and distrust of adults who say they’re there to help, courtesy of his mother being screwed over by a lawyer during her divorce. Renfro handles the dramatic moments well, but he’s also really natural in the scenes where Mark’s just being a smartass preteen or forming a tentative friendship with Reggie. Renfro’s career was tragically cut short by addiction (he died in 2008 at the age of 25), and The Client was a great debut, regardless of how much acting experience he had before cameras rolled.
One thing I forgot in the decades between my viewings of The Client is the film’s focus on Mark’s economic status. Mark’s a trailer park kid and his mom (Mary Louise-Parker) is struggling to pay the rent, suffering setbacks for having a kid at a young age and then marrying a man who left her high and dry. Schumacher lingers on the crowded, dingy halls of the charity hospital from which the family is forced to receive care. Foltrigg and his crew look down on Mark as a dumb kid and try to force a confession because they don’t believe his family has the funds to hire a lawyer, and there’s a definite contrast between their slick suits and Reggie’s more modest court outfits. It’s maybe the only film that frames entering the Witness Protection Program as a means to social mobility. One thing I appreciate about Grisham is that his films weren’t just impersonal plot machines; he had convictions and liked his characters (The Firm centers on a Faustian temptation, The Chamber is a sympathetic anti-capital punishment story, and The Mission deals just as much with overseas missions work as it does the law). It gives the movie a texture and warmth that elevates it above other slick legal thrillers.
The Client is never quite able to figure out how to make its thriller elements crackle as well as its dramatic ones. Aside from Coates, the mobsters are mostly bumbling idiots; LaPaglia is fun to watch, but the film’s bad guy is basically the Family embarrassment. Schumacher can’t wring too much tension out of the requisite melodramatic moments; a climactic scene involving the discovery of a body is more tedious than suspenseful, and the film draws much more tension from its negotiations between Reggie and the FBI than its scenes involving anyone holding a gun. That’s not necessarily a complaint; the film is a thriller that is more interested in dialogue than violence, and I kind of miss the days when audiences would show up just to see good actors do their thing (the film took in a healthy $90 million on a $45 million budget and was one of the top 15 films of the year).
Today, The Client would likely be an eight-episode streaming series (it actually had a TV spinoff starring JoBeth Williams as Reggie that debuted in 1995 and lasted one season; Ossie Davis even returned for it). And you can pretty much predict that it would be full of dramatic moments but also a lot of wheel-spinning. I miss the days when, instead of Prestige TV, studios were willing to give us a mid-budget summer counter-programmer that was content to be a lightweight but capably directed and acted story that felt like a respite from the gunfights and explosions playing down the hall. Maybe Grisham just needs to write a few more books.
Previous Summer of ‘94 entries
The Firm, Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Chamber, The Rainmaker and Runaway Jury. There were two other Grisham film adaptations – A Painted House, which was a TV movie released in 2003, and Christmas With the Cranks, which came out in 2004 – but they are a drama and holiday comedy, respectively, so they’re not really part of this subgenre.
Good piece on a movie I happen to have rewatched recently!