Movie - The Firm

The Firm (1993)
June 30, 1993
Review/Film: The Firm; A Mole in the Den of Corrupt Legal Lions
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: June 30, 1993
At the time it was published in 1991, "The Firm," John Grisham's best-selling suspense novel, was described by one critic as "mean and lean." Mean, possibly, but lean? The book is 501 pages.


Now Sydney Pollack's film version far more accurately characterizes the source material. The movie is extremely long (two hours and 34 minutes) and so slow that by the end you feel as if you've been standing up even if you've been sitting down. It moves around the map a lot, from Boston to Memphis to the Caribbean to Washington, without getting anywhere. It is also physically elaborate, the cinematic equivalent of the book's relentlessly descriptive prose. One of its sets is reported to have required seven and a half miles of 2-by-4 lumber and 225 gallons of glue to hold it together.

But, you may well ask, what about the story? After all, underneath Mr. Grisham's verbiage but not quite suffocated by it, there is an entertaining moral tale about the 1980's:

Mitch McDeere, a bright young man, born poor and deprived, lusts for the good things in life. He graduates from Harvard Law School near the top of his class and joins a small, conservative, very rich firm of tax and corporate law specialists in Memphis. Almost immediately, he discovers that he has sold his soul to the devil. Or, as a Federal agent tells Mitch in the movie, "Your life, as you've known it, is now over."

Bendini, Lambert & Locke is a front for a conspiracy of delicious malevolence and, early on, anyway, quite persuasive complexity. Only its senior partners know its full scope. The firm has a policy of bringing aboard crackerjack young lawyers of Mitch's hungry background, and then overpaying and materially spoiling them to the point that when they find out the firm's true nature, they can't afford to quit.

There are only two ways for lawyers to exit Bendini, Lambert & Locke. They can stick around until they retire as thoroughly compromised, multi-millionaire senior partners, or they die before their time in mysterious circumstances.

Not long after he joins the firm, Mitch is approached by the F.B.I. The bureau wants him to act as a mole. They point out that his house and his office are bugged by the firm, and that at least three of his restless predecessors have been murdered. On the other hand, Mitch realizes that the firm's business associates have long memories and that no witness protection program is 100 percent reliable. What is a guy to do?

As in the novel, what the guy does is the heart of the film directed by Mr. Pollack and written by David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rayfiel. Mitch (Tom Cruise) plays each side against the other in a manner that becomes increasing mysterious until, near the end, even someone who has read the book is likely to be lost. Whether the problem is in the writing, the direction or maybe the editing is anybody's guess. Whatever the reason, the film's end is a long time coming and, when it finally does arrive, is unable to do justice to the buildup.

"The Firm" has been so extravagantly cast that its two liveliest performances are by stars in comparatively small roles. Holly Hunter, who was named the best actress at this year's Cannes festival for Jane Campion's "Piano," has a ball as a cheeky Memphis secretary, who's married to an Elvis Presley impersonator and who turns into an unlikely heroine when the chips are down. Equally good is Gary Busey as a cheerful, down-and-dirty private eye who figures in Mitch's initial investigations into the firm's darker associations.

The ever-reliable Gene Hackman appears as Avery Tolar, the firm's partner who becomes, in effect, Mitch's control, the man assigned to break in the new recruit and to guide him on the downward path. Mr. Hackman has reached that plateau in his career where he can play almost any kind of part in a way that gives it both credibility and humanity.

For that matter, there's nothing wrong with any of the performances in "The Firm." Mr. Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who plays Mitch's wife, Abby, are attractive as a young, rather vacuous couple in distress, defined more by their actions than by anything they are given to say, which is as it should be. David Straithairn appears as Mitch's somewhat enigmatic brother, Ray, a jailbird, and Ed Harris gives a strong performance as an F.B.I. agent whose shiny, eye-catching bald head would not make it easy for him to go unnoticed in a stakeout.

As if to change his television image as a lovable old geezer who can't eat enough Quaker Oats, Wilford Brimley turns up as the firm's most vicious hit man. Aw, shucks.

In spite of all this talent, "The Firm" is something less than a nonstop pleasure. The adjustments made in the story are intelligent ones even if, by the end, Mitch has come to seem almost as devious and opportunistic as the people he's fighting. That could be the film's own comment on the time, place and characters.

A more difficult problem is the film's pace, which may have something to do with the editing. "The Firm" maintains its sluggish gait even through its concluding sequence, which frantically cross-cuts between simultaneous actions in the Cayman Islands and Memphis. One will accept almost anything in a suspense movie as long as the payoff satisfies. That's what they're all about.

"The Firm" ultimately provides no liberation from the sweet tyranny of its own plotting.

"The Firm" has been rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has a lot of vulgar language and some violence. The Firm Directed by Sydney Pollack; written by David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rayfiel, based on the novel by John Grisham; director of photography, John Seale; edited by William Steinkamp and Fredric Steinkamp; music by Dave Grusin; production designer, Richard MacDonald; produced by Scott Rudin and John Davis; released by Paramount. Running time: 154 minutes. This film is rated R. Mitch McDeere . . . Tom Cruise Abby McDeere . . . Jeanne Tripplehorn Avery Tolar . . . Gene Hackman Oliver Lambert . . . Hal Holbrook Lamar Quinn . . . Terry Kinney William Devasher . . . Wilford Brimley Wayne Tarrance . . . Ed Harris Tammy Hemphill . . . Holly Hunter

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