In a sentenceTommy Lee Jones quoting scripture at a child and losing
Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) takes his little brother into the woods behind their trailer park to smoke and finds a black Lincoln with a hose running from the exhaust into the window. The lawyer inside is drunk and wants to die; before he manages it, he tells Mark where a murdered senator is buried. The brother goes into shock, and the police, the FBI and a district attorney called Roy Foltrigg (Tommy Lee Jones) arrive at the hospital wanting what Mark knows. His mother, Dianne (Mary-Louise Parker), cannot afford a lawyer. Mark finds one anyway: Reggie Love (Susan Sarandon), not long in practice and not long sober, who takes his case for the dollar he has in his pocket. The men who buried the senator would prefer he kept quiet.
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Joel Schumacher’s Grisham adaptation is the small one, and better for it: a boy, a lawyer and a prosecutor in cramped rooms, shouting. Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones carry it with evident pleasure; the gangsters very nearly sink it.
John Grisham’s thrillers tend to arrive on screen with a lot of furniture: a Supreme Court, a law firm with a second set of books. The Client has none of that. A boy in a trailer park sees something, a prosecutor wants it out of him, and a lawyer stands in the way. Joel Schumacher treats it as a chamber piece with the occasional car, and for most of its 119 minutes that is the right call. It is a good, plain, well-acted thriller about who gets to speak for a child.
The opening is the best thing in it. Mark (Brad Renfro) and his little brother sneak into the woods to smoke, and a black Lincoln pulls up with a hose running from the exhaust into the window. Mark pulls the hose out, then goes back and does it again; the drunk lawyer inside drags him into the car and tells him where a dead senator is buried. Tony Pierce-Roberts shoots it in low afternoon light through the trees, so the car looks like a wrong thing dropped in a pleasant place, and Robert Brown cuts the hose business so that each time the boy goes back we were sure he would not get out. We were frightened for him, and the fear comes from Renfro, who plays the whole thing as a kid too proud to run.
Then the adults arrive. Tommy Lee Jones plays Roy Foltrigg, a prosecutor with a television anchor’s hair and a line of scripture for every occasion, and he does not so much enter a room as take it into custody. Susan Sarandon’s Reggie Love works out of a small office and takes Mark on because he puts a dollar on her desk. Their scenes together are the film. She needles, he preaches, and both of them are performing for the boy. We laughed out loud when she tells Foltrigg, with perfect courtesy, what she thinks of his taste in cameras; here is a courtroom film in which the people arguing are cleverer than the plot.
Mary-Louise Parker’s Dianne Sway spends most of the film in a hospital corridor, smoking and losing a job she cannot afford to lose, and Parker makes her frightened rather than tragic. Anthony Edwards is likeable as Clint, Reggie’s assistant. Bradley Whitford, J. T. Walsh and Will Patton divide the law-enforcement duties and are mostly there to be outwitted by a child. Bruno Rubeo gives Reggie an office of filing cabinets and the hospital a run of pale green corridors, and Ingrid Ferrin puts Jones in suits a size too confident.
What does not work is the other side of the case. Anthony LaPaglia’s Barry Muldano, the gangster who would like the boy to forget, has a ponytail and a switchblade, Kim Coates’s Gronke is his muscle, and every time the film cuts to them it drops from drama into comic strip. The danger to Mark is real on paper and never once on screen. The screenplay, by Akiva Goldsman and Robert Getchell, has trouble with the middle, where the boy is moved from room to room while grown-ups talk about him; somewhere around the hour we caught ourselves checking the time. Howard Shore’s score pushes a low brass pulse under the chases that the chases have not earned, and is better in the quiet, where a few piano notes under Sarandon do the work.
Set against the other Grisham films, this is the least grand and the most alive. The Firm (1993) had Tom Cruise running from his own law firm; The Pelican Brief (1993) had a conspiracy. This one is about three people and whose side a child should be on, and Schumacher, who would come back to Grisham with A Time to Kill (1996), understands that an argument in a hospital cafeteria can be the action.
Worth an evening if you like your thrillers talky and your lawyers tired. The gangsters you will have to forgive. It carries a 15, runs just under two hours, and the best thing in it is a boy declining to be impressed by a man who is used to impressing people.
Most critics find The Client a brisk, competent thriller and a smaller-scale, more human John Grisham adaptation. The praise clusters on Susan Sarandon’s lawyer, which several reviews single out as the film’s centre, with Tommy Lee Jones’s scenes opposite her also noted. Joel Schumacher is credited with keeping a large cast in order and the plot moving. One later review reserves its warmest words for Brad Renfro as the boy, who is said to hold his own against the veterans.
The reservations are about the script rather than the acting. Several critics call the set-ups predictable and the characterisation broad, which keeps the film involving rather than gripping. Variety is the dissenter, finding it formulaic, short on suspense and only adequately performed, with the opening sequence its strongest stretch. Otherwise the spread is narrow, from mildly enthusiastic to mildly let down, though three of the eight reviews could not be read in full, so the picture is less firm than the numbers suggest.
The critic presents the film as a more human-scale John Grisham adaptation. Susan Sarandon’s lawyer and the smaller-scale approach are singled out positively.
Read the full review →Errigo calls it a taut, recommended suspense thriller with strong characterisation. She especially praises Susan Sarandon’s performance, while noting that Schumacher efficiently handles the many characters.
Read the full review →Turan finds the film an involving, fast-moving thriller, though its broad strokes and predictable setups keep it from being nuanced. He singles out Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, whose performances and scenes together provide the film’s strongest moments.
Read the full review →The page could not be accessed, so the critic’s verdict is unavailable. No praise or complaint from the review could be verified.
Read the full review →The page text is inaccessible, so the critic’s verdict cannot be verified. No specific praise or complaint can be reliably identified.
Read the full review →The page identifies itself as a review, but the critic’s verdict is unavailable. The article text also provides no detail about what the critic praises or criticises.
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WitnessAnother boy who saw too much, and a policeman who has to keep him alive.
The VerdictA lawyer with a drink problem and one case that might put her right; here, him.
The Night of the HunterTwo children carrying a secret, pursued by a man who talks like a preacher.
A Time to KillSchumacher’s second Grisham, bigger and sweatier, with the same taste for courtroom argument.
Erin BrockovichLawyering from the bottom of the building, by a woman nobody expected to win.
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