Written by John Grisham, Akiva Goldsman, and Robert Getchell
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Based on the best-selling novel by John Grisham, The Client stays true to the saying that the book is usually better than the movie. I wish it wasn’t so. The book was quite compelling, like many of Grisham’s work. However, for some reason when translated to the big screen it doesn’t work quite as well as it did on the printed page.
Eleven-year-old Mark Sway (portrayed by Brad Renfro) is a latch-key son of a single working mother. Â He’s a bit of a miscreant, but not as bad as some children in the same situation. Â While he’s in the woods near his home, he sees a man about to commit suicide by automobile. Â He tries to do the right thing by pulling the hose out of the tailpipe and is discovered. Â The man brings him into the car, figuring they will die together. Â Turns out he is a mob lawyer who tells Mark a few things before he kills himself, including information about a dead Senator and where the body is buried.
Mark tries to hide what he knows but is frightened by the questions being asked and what he sees on television news reports. He hires Reggie Love (portrayed by Susan Sarandon) as his lawyer to protect him more from the so-called “good guys” and cut a deal for him and his family.
I can’t fault the acting really. The cast is excellent. Led by Sarandon as Love, she’s sympathetic without going overboard on the sentimentality. She really conveys the feel of a woman who’s been through quite a bit in her life without gushing about it at every turn. There is a candid moment in the film when she does let her guard down, but that’s a way to let the viewers know what’s going on. It’s a shame because, with the book, there didn’t have to be that conversation; the readers were given her history. This is often why books flow better and films have to have awkward conversations to allow the audience to know the character better.
Opposite her is Tommy Lee Jones. He’s great as always. He’s a prosecutor who wants the win no matter what the cost. About the only thought he gives to the impact of what he’s doing is in how it will impact him politically. It makes a great cat-and-mouse with the two leads. He’s not all bad, he’s just self-serving and she uses that. The two of them positively spark in scenes together.
Add into that Brad Renfro in his first screen role who is magnificent as Mark Sway and it would seem you’d have the perfect film. So what gives?
The problem is what I alluded to above. There’s much in the story in the book that the reader knows that here has to be conveyed in conversations that just feel stilted and forced. Add in a few contrived action sequences that don’t make sense in the scope of it all and what was a great film loses its appeal.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. I did enjoy watching The Client again recently. What’s good about it definitely makes it worth watching. Joel Schumacher directed and for once he does show some restraint from the grandiose ways he sometimes presents the stories in his films. What is disappointing is that it’s not as good as it could be. While watching I could see the potential that just seems to get missed. Still, it’s worth watching if you have the time.
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Categories: Movie Reviews
The trick to enjoying a movie that’s based on a novel or non-fiction book is simple: don’t expect the film version to match the source faithfully. Especially if, as it is here, the adaptation is a typical two-hour feature film. Screenwriters must cherrypick events from a medium (the printed word) which has zero restrictions on budgets and runtime and translate them into a story based on sights and sounds. A novelist has the luxury of telling a story with multiple settings and a slew of subplots and not have to worry about such things as “How much will it cost to go to London and shoot some sequences there?” A film producer, on the other hand, does have to worry about that, plus…there’s also the innate need to tweak things a little for the movie version. (I mean, if people know how the story’s going to end, why make a movie adaptation at all?)
Even Nicholas Meyer (who directed two of the best Star Trek films with the TOS cast) said that he changed quite a bit of “The Seven Percent Solution” when he adapted his 1974 novel for director Herbert Ross, arguing that it’s always a good idea to depart from the letter of a literary work, so long as you keep its basic plot and themes. (Steven Spielberg did that with Jaws, and to good effect.)
In my own experience, I’ve discussed the (unlikely)) possibility of adapting either my existing novella or my upcoming novel with a filmmaking buddy. He says it can be done, of course. But compromises would need to be made about what bits of the story would go into a film version, and which would not be in the script.
Syd Fields, in his book “Screenplay,” explains this much better than I can in the chapter about adaptation.