THE RAINMAKER (66)

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Matt Damon, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, Danny deVito

The Pitch: A young Memphis lawyer opens an office, his cases including a leukaemia victim's suit against a big insurance company.

Theo Sez: ...or JOHN GRISHAM'S THE RAINMAKER, to give it its full title - which is fair enough, since this is probably as fine an adaptation (as opposed to a subversive re-imagining) of a Grisham novel as we're likely to see. The author's heart has always been in the right place - what makes his books bearable is their genuine sympathy for the weak and disenfranchised, their contempt for $1000/hr. lawyers "pissing down on the whole justice system" ; and what makes them dull is the poverty of his imagination and the metronomic efficiency of his plotting. When the characters have a specific goal to work towards, or a mystery to solve (THE PELICAN BRIEF), Grishamovies tend to seem mechanical and second-rate ; which is why this loose-limbed film, leisurely as the cadences of a Southern drawl, is so unexpectedly wonderful - for about half its length, anyway. Its over-riding theme is family, our young hero's longing to belong, the way he idealises family ties (looking shocked when the old lady he represents wants to disinherit her kids), and the way that - failed first by his own, abusive family then by the corrupt, back-biting "family" that's the legal profession - he knits together his clients into an improvised family of the oppressed and abandoned ; it's a film not about solving any particular case but about what it means - or should mean, in Grisham's pious worldview - to be a lawyer. Didacticism is kept at bay by the film's low-key, natural-light loveliness and by the boyish vulnerability of Damon's performance (with its edge of unfinished business, repressed anger that could erupt into violence) ; above all, it's kept at bay by the film's structure, rambling casually between three separate cases. Unsurprisingly, everything changes - and falls apart - in the final act, when it becomes a courtroom drama and, inevitably, does become about solving a particular case, exposing all the rusty mechanics hitherto camouflaged : cross-examination gets instant results (but isn't followed by re-examination), the judge reverses himself on the basis of a single precedent, and it takes only a bit of rooting around in a rubbish-bin to track down the whereabouts of a Surprise Witness. At times like these you begin to wonder if this whole debased genre isn't simply beyond redemption ; otherwise, this is probably as good as it gets. Tender, diffident and very likeable.