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Movie Reviews: New This Week
New South, Old Clichés

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A Time To Kill, starring Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sandra Bullock; directed by Joel Schumacher

Two rednecked, beer-swilling, pussel-gutted, terminally inbred yahoos in a pickup truck seize a ten-year-old black girl along a backcountry road and beat, rape, and then hang her. They botch the hanging, which is one reason they are quickly taken into custody. And because she is black and they are white and this is the South (however putatively New), we may forgive the girl's father ( Samuel L. Jackson ) for fearing they'll go free, and deciding to exact his own justice. Or maybe not.

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A Time To Kill, John Grisham's first novel, got widely published only after The Firm had made him the best-selling author in America. Four or five bestsellers later, it's still the author's favorite. It is also the one that has the most personality and the most lived-in textures of place, climate, and community. We may assume without condescension that Grisham felt a certain identification with its protagonist, Jake Brigance--a young Southern lawyer, comparatively liberal, with many unpaid bills and a tacit resolve to "save the world one case at a time"--who undertakes to defend the avenging black father in a trial for murder, despite mounting threats and interference from every quadrant of the sociopolitical compass.

Grisham was very particular about how his pet book would be brought to the screen, and writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher (they did The Client) have been extremely faithful, apart from repairing a few structural gaffes--especially the coming-out-of-nowhere climax--that taxed the neophyte novelist's abilities. Yet in a weird way, the fidelity backfires. Schumacher's slick direction streamlines 50 the narrative but also underscores what a baldly manipulative package it was to begin with. His large cast is accomplished and mostly very entertaining to watch--he keeps such inveterate hams as Donald Sutherland , Kevin Spacey , and Patrick McGoohan under control, and Sandra Bullock as a resourceful Ole Miss law student is less tic-y than we've seen her in years--but they're playing walking clichés scarcely less exaggerated than the miscreants who first put us in a lynching mood.

Jake Brigance is a cliché too, but that doesn't greatly matter--indeed, it may even cease to be true--because Matthew McConaughey turns out to be every bit as wonderful as all the a-star-is-born publicity would have us believe. There are, as another cliché has it, "people the camera likes." This doesn't mean only that they are comely and personable. It means that whenever they are on-screen you want to watch them, even doing nothing, because their intelligence and spirit photographs, and takes on moral and ethical values. Gary Cooper had that quality, the young Paul Newman had it (and so does Ashley Judd, who does wonders with the thankless role of Jake's wife, who may not stand by her man). McConaughey has it to burn. Just look at his face when he is told what has happened to the girl. "Little Tanya?" is all he says, but his world has just changed irrevocably. -- Richard T. Jameson

(Rated R for violence, language)

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