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- <text id=93TT2006>
- <title>
- July 05, 1993: Reviews:Cinema
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- July 05, 1993 Hitting Back At Terrorists
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- REVIEWS, Page 58
- CINEMA
- Wrong Arm of The Law
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>By RICHARD CORLISS
- </p>
- <qt>
- <l>TITLE: The Firm</l>
- <l>DIRECTOR: Sydney Pollack</l>
- <l>WRITERS: David Rabe, Robert Towne, David Rayfiel</l>
- </qt>
- <p> THE BOTTOM LINE: Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller
- movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end.
- </p>
- <p> Adapting a best seller for the movies is like carving flesh
- down to bone. You keep the skeleton, then apply rouge and silicone
- until the creature looks human. Any screenwriter adapting the
- 500-page novel The Firm, John Grisham's tort thriller about
- tax attorneys fronting for the Mafia, would try to streamline
- the story, infuse action into a narrative that is mostly lawyers
- chatting, give an emotional history to characters who are basically
- plot props and...please, a new ending. Grisham spun a lovely
- yarn--the venality, the conspiracy, the flypaper guilt--then let it unravel at the denouement. His climax had the hero
- in a Florida motel waiting for a FedEx package!
- </p>
- <p> The Firm was one of those "it-kept-me-up-all-night" page turners
- for which there is no equivalent in movie hype. "I sat all the
- way through it" just doesn't have the same zing. But that is
- what to expect from the film of The Firm, which clocks in at
- 2 1/2 hours--barely shorter than the audiocassette version
- of the novel. It's more bustle than brio.
- </p>
- <p> The movie begins sharply, laying out the panoply of privilege:
- the sleek cars, the comfortable faces (Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook).
- It's like going on a shopping spree at Neiman Marcus and then
- getting whacked with the bill: here is the middle class's Faustian
- bargain of big money and sapping compromise, of anxious wives
- and Stepford lives. How handsome the paneling on a lawyer's
- desk--as handsome as the paneling on a lawyer's casket. At
- Bendini, Lambert & Locke, death is the penalty for abusing the
- rule of confidentiality. Harvard Law whiz Mitch McDeere (Tom
- Cruise) will break that rule and many others honored by his
- firm, the Mob, the FBI and his resilient wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
- </p>
- <p> So far, so good. Cruise, like Robert Redford two decades ago,
- is a Hollywood hunk who has played it smart by playing smart
- guys: young men with cute brain waves who can make intelligence
- and idealism sexy. He and the pricey cast (Ed Harris, Holly
- Hunter, Wilford Brimley) make the machinery purr. The writers
- have corrected the book's dangling threat--how to confront
- and cleverly resolve Mitch's brief disloyalty to Abby--and
- its stodgy ending. The movie's moral is that however corrupt
- the Mob is, these lawyers are worse. Better for Mitch to cut
- a deal with a don than to let the firm stay in business.
- </p>
- <p> Too often though, Sydney Pollack, whose swank and care energized
- the Redford thriller Three Days of the Condor in 1975, surrenders
- to genre goofiness, setting up bad guys who are omnipotent at
- the start and impotent at the end. Like a complex lawsuit, the
- movie gets buried in paperwork; there's too much walking and
- talking. (See Tom think. See Tom brood. See Tom make photocopies.
- See Tom amble across his living room--in slow motion.) And
- at the end, too much running and gunning. Maybe every thriller
- demands a chase, but a clever thriller deserves a better one.
- On that endless, aimless run, Mitch loses his way, and The Firm
- goes flabby.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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