If legal thrillers and legal comedies are staples of the hit book and movie market, John Grisham’s melodramas of justice delayed definitely rule the roost: big, breathlessly paced, slick concoctions that keep whipping us expertly through the same nightmare plots and David-and-Goliath courtroom battles.
Even so, “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker” is different. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola from yet another Grisham best seller — his 1995 novel about a multimillion-dollar lawsuit waged against a huge insurance company by a tiny Memphis law firm — this picture has a warmth, style, humanity and contagious humor that go way beyond the other Grisham-derived pictures.
Beautifully acted, top to bottom, by a remarkable cast that includes Jon Voight, Danny DeVito, Claire Danes, Danny Glover, Mickey Rourke and young Matt Damon as Rudy Baylor, the underdog hero, “The Rainmaker” is the best American movie courtroom drama since 1982’s “The Verdict” — and maybe since “Anatomy of a Murder” back in 1959. Compared with the other Grisham films, from 1993’s “The Firm” to last year’s “The Chamber” and “A Time to Kill,” “The Rainmaker” is a richer, deeper, more enjoyable work, however much it resembles its Grisham cousins.
As in “The Client” and “A Time to Kill,” there’s another taut plot centering on a brave, smart but morally conflicted lawyer, Rudy Baylor (Damon), fighting powerful and lightly scrupled foes for a poor, vulnerable client. Here, Rudy, fresh out of Memphis law school, takes on the case of Donny Ray Black (Johnny Whitworth), a young man dying of leukemia but denied medical coverage eight times by his insurance company, Great Benefit.
Rudy takes the case out of both necessity and idealism. Though he has genuine feeling for the Black family (with Mary Kay Place and Elvis Presley crony Red West playing Donny Ray’s parents), he’s a neophyte who can’t get “good” (that is, rich) clients. At first, he works for an amiably corrupt local attorney and strip-club owner, Bruiser Stone (Rourke). And when Bruiser flees the country to avoid prosecution, Rudy opens up a shoestring firm with another of Bruiser’s boys, fast-talking “para-lawyer” Deck Shifflet (DeVito). Incredibly savvy in back-alley court practices, Deck is inept at bar examinations, which he has already failed six times.
To the makeshift new firm, Rudy brings two clients: the pixilated Miss Birdie (Teresa Wright), who wants to disinherit her children and winds up as Rudy’s landlady, and the Black family. Arrayed against Rudy in the Black case is a high-priced law combine headed by ace Leo F. Drummond (Voight), who’s so confident of the case that he benevolently sponsors Rudy, who has to be sworn in as a lawyer before the trial begins. Rudy is outmanned, outgunned, outspent, outclassed. But the rookie gets one lucky break: Old Boy Judge Harvey Hale (Dean Stockwell), on the verge of dismissing the Blacks’ case, dies of a heart attack and is replaced by black civil rights veteran Tyrone Kipler (Glover), who, while scrupulously fair in court, is partial to Rudy and his clients.
The title “The Rainmaker” refers to a lawyer who wins a huge jury award, a cloudburst of cash. (There’s no connection to the other movie “The Rainmaker,” the 1956 film of N. Richard Nash’s play, with Katharine Hepburn as a Western spinster and Burt Lancaster as a rainmaking conman.) And, while the legal tricks turn down and dirty, Rudy strives for justice in a cheerfully rotten system that laughs at principle and guffaws at the notion of equality before the law for rich and poor. There’s also a strained romantic subplot: Rudy’s courtship of battered wife Kelly Riker (Danes), whose psycho-jock husband (Andrew Shue) keeps putting her in the hospital. Grisham took this romance, meant to underscore Rudy’s decency, much too far in the book, piling melodrama on melodrama. The movie repeats his mistake.
That may be the film’s only major misstep. “The Rainmaker” has a wit and emotional density that Grisham — for all his expertise at pace and plotting — rarely achieves in his books. Like “Anatomy of a Murder,” the film pleases us by its court knowledge. But it goes farther, making an elaborate comedy of manners out of courtroom cross-fires and brouhahas.
DeVito, as you might expect, gets the lion’s share of the laughs: Deck Shifflet is one of his great wily, swaggering roles and more sympathetic than most. Wright gives Birdie a delicate hilarity, and Rourke makes a devilish clown out of Bruiser. Voight — amazingly active and good throughout his busy 1997 (“Rosewood,” “Anaconda,” “Most Wanted,” “U-Turn” and here) — is immensely funny as well. Coppola tends to treat the expensive lawyers and Great Benefit executives as comic characters — liars, phonies and swindlers — while Rudy is written as a sort of straight man. This deft intermingling of comedy and drama gives the movie its emotional suppleness.
Grisham’s books have been adapted by a variety of talented directors, ranging from old ’60s liberal pros Sydney Pollack and Alan Pakula, to the flashier Joel Schumacher and James Foley. But Coppola, like Robert Altman (helmer for the next Grisham film, an original script called “The Gingerbread Man”), brings an entirely different level of skill and ambition. He proves to be an ideal filmmaker for Grisham, just as he was a quarter-century ago, for best-selling author Mario Puzo with “The Godfather.” Though “The Rainmaker” doesn’t offer the same opportunities as Puzo’s Jacobean crime-family saga, Coppola is able to preserve and enhance the book’s strengths, downplay or mask most of its flaws. Working near the top of his form, he and his extraordinary cast and company turn an expert, crowd-pleasing best-seller into a film of greater warmth, humanity and humor.
There is something innately absurd about a lot of current upper-class American legal culture. But “The Rainmaker,” like “The Devil’s Advocate,” balances cynical humor at the system’s corruption with idealistic sentiment for the victims. There’s a quality to the movie that, however dark, seems almost Capraesque. And how you respond may depend on how often you root for the underdog and whether you regard Hollywood anti-establishment fables — in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or here — as hopelessly cliched.
Nothing can lift the spirit as cornily or well, however, as a movie like this — even though Coppola and Grisham give us a touch of darkness at the end. If the Paramount pressbook insists on calling this picture “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker,” it’s obviously to emphasize the original author, to protect Grisham from the exultation of movie directors. But, whatever the movie’s title, in many important ways, it’s Coppola who makes the rain.
”JOHN GRISHAM’S THE RAINMAKER”
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Directed by Francis Ford Coppola; written by Coppola, based on John Grisham’s novel “The Rainmaker”; photographed by John Toll; edited by Barry Malkin; production designed by Howard Cummings; music by Elmer Bernstein; produced by Michael Douglas, Steven Reuther, Fred Fuchs. A Paramount Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:17. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Rudy Baylor ……………….. Matt Damon
Kelly Riker ……………….. Claire Danes
Leo F. Drummond ……………. Jon Voight
Deck Shifflet ……………… Danny DeVito
Judge Tyrone Kipler ………… Danny Glover
Dot Black …………………. Mary Kay Place
Bruiser Stone ……………… Mickey Rourke
Miss Birdie ……………….. Teresa Wright
