The Client
Joel Schumacher (1994)
John Grisham’s books are famous for being page-turners. Joel Schumacher’s crude but businesslike direction of this adaptation of Grisham’s fourth novel (published the year before the film appeared) achieves a kind of cinematic equivalent – you keep watching. But whereas turning the page of a book requires an act of will, however small, on the part of the reader, the relentless momentum of The Client on screen is assaultive, coercive – an experience all the more unpleasant because the movie is so shallow. We recorded it from Film 4 and I felt relieved whenever the commercials arrived. It’s clear from the start what you’re in for. Two young brothers – hiding out, to smoke cigarettes, in a forest near their Memphis home – are interrupted by a man parking his car nearby. The elder brother, eleven-year-old Mark (Brad Renfro), realises the man is trying to commit suicide by inhaling the exhaust fumes from his car’s running engine. When Mark foils the attempt, the man – a crooked lawyer called Jerome Clifford – grabs him and gets Mark in the car, at one point threatening him with a gun. Mark’s experience is, or should be, terrifying – but Schumacher has cast as Clifford an actor called Walter Olkewicz, who’s frightening thanks entirely to close-ups of his sweaty, glowering obesity. Nor is there any suggestion that Clifford is himself a frightened man, even though he’s decided to take his own life in preference to being murdered by the gangster he was due to defend in court. Eventually Clifford does top himself and the boys escape.
The episode sends Mark’s younger brother Ricky (David Speck) into a post-traumatic stupor that lasts for the rest of the film but Mark becomes a witness of potentially crucial importance to the authorities, who work out that Clifford, when he was holding the boy inside the car, told Mark the location of the corpse of a Louisiana senator believed to have been murdered by Barry ‘The Blade’ Muldanno, the hood whom Clifford was to have defended,. The forces of self-serving law and order are represented principally by Roy Foltrigg (Tommy Lee Jones), a federal prosecutor with ambitions of running for state governor. Mark – frightened to reveal what Clifford told him because he swore in the car he wouldn’t, and is scared that Muldanno’s crew will get him – decides to get himself a lawyer. He stumbles into the office of Regina ‘Reggie’ Love (Susan Sarandon), who agrees to take on this young client for free. She’s a recovering alcoholic whose drink problem meant that, when Reggie’s marriage broke up, her husband was given custody of their children.
Schumacher’s direction, supported by Howard Shore’s generic score, leaves no doubt that you’re watching a thriller, even though the plot unfolds with brisk predictability and without suspense. I suppose it’s coherent with this that most of the acting in The Client is externalised and hollow. This is entertaining in the case of Tommy Lee Jones, whose delivery of Roy Foltrigg’s first few lines brings the screen alive and who keeps taking you, pleasurably, by surprise with little things: a flourishing ‘cool it’ hand gesture to his acolytes during court proceedings, the dynamic speed with which Foltrigg suddenly sits down in a diner. Susan Sarandon, although her performance was seriously overpraised (she was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA as Best Actress), is effective when Reggie is feeling too much to be able to speak – unfortunately, this doesn’t happen often in the wordy script by Akiva Goldsman and Robert Getchell. William H Macy, before he was a big name, does good work in the small role of a hospital doctor but Mary Louise Parker is strenuously theatrical as Mark’s mother and Anthony LaPaglia merely flashy as Muldanno. Except for Ron Dean, who plays Muldanno’s uncle, the mobsters are cartoonish, not remotely scary.
The main weakness, however, is Brad Renfro as Mark. Renfro, after years of drugs and alcohol addiction, died of a heroin overdose in 2008, at the age of twenty-five. His biography on Wikipedia suggests a far from easy or comfortable upbringing but Renfro is unconvincing in The Client as a trailer-trash kid (as Mary Louise Parker is unconvincing as a trailer-trash mother). He seems much more like a practised, self-aware child actor – he acts, and reacts, at every opportunity, usually in the most obvious way. I liked Renfro in Ghost World (2000) so am inclined to blame what happens here on Joel Schumacher: whoever’s responsible, the worked-out superficiality of Renfro’s playing makes Mark’s predicament unaffecting and the crucial idea of the child’s being frightened to tell the whole truth implausible. There’s no sense of a kid at the mercies of a variously challenging adult world that he gradually, through native wit and pluck, gets to grips with. Brad Renfro’s Mark is knowing from the word go.
12 July 2014