Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9310150321
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DESMOND RYAN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Shakespeare,
``Henry VI, Part II
Though he's never read a word of Shakespeare, the cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex in ``Jurassic Park'' knows just what to do. When it's time to choose his first human for conspicuous consumption, he instinctively takes the Bard's advice and selects - what else? - a lawyer.
When T. Rex finds the attorney cowering in the stall of an outdoor toilet, the audience greets the beast's ravenous chomping with as many cheers as screams. In taking yet another swipe at the legal profession, Steven Spielberg knows he's pushing the right crowd-pleasing button: A reversing ambulance would leave tread marks over half the lawyers who have sleazed, schemed and manipulated their way through movies in the last 10 years.
Last week, a profession tirelessly bashed by filmmakers, politicians and comics (a current variation on an old joke has T. Rex refusing to bite the lawyer out of professional courtesy) looked for some legal redress with the release of Sydney Pollack's ``The Firm.''
Sure, it's based on attorney John Grisham's best-selling novel about a Memphis law firm that's a 24-hour laundromat for Mafia money. And, yes, the senior partners kill lawyers who get out of line with more alacrity than T. Rex.
But, hey, the good guy is a lawyer! And he's played by no less than Tom Cruise, who gave legal eagles a sorely needed morale boost in ``A Few Good Men.'' This could be a regular ``Tort Gun'' - the return of lawyer as hero, the golden days of Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow in "Inherit the Wind'' and Gregory Peck as stalwart and decent Aticus Finch in ``To Kill a Mockingbird.''
But Pollack, like other directors, knows which way the wind - inherited or otherwise - is blowing, and Cruise's character in ``The Firm'' does not withstand close cross-examination. Mitch McDeere, the smart Harvard law grad who gets in over his head in ``The Firm,'' marks a little progress for the lawyerly screen image.
But what wouldn't be an improvement over the likes of ``The Verdict's'' Frank Galvin, whose only call to the bar is for another Irish whiskey? Or ``Cape Fear's'' ``Slippery Sam'' Bowden, who ``plays dirty for a living?'' (And that opinion comes from his wife.)
In terms of film portrayals, the rock bottom for attorneys and the seething public hostility and distrust they engender was surely Mike Nichols' ``RegardingHenry.'' Here it was suggested that the only way to restore a lawyer's humanity was to shoot him in the head and start over.
``It's definitely never been as bad as it is today,'' said Doreen Weisenhaus, editor-in-chief of the New York-based National Law Journal in a telephone interview. ``But then, it's never been that great througout our history.
``Americans have always loved to bash lawyers. After Grisham's books and now the film of `The Firm,' the feeling among lawyers is that we can't sink any lower,'' said Weisenhaus. ``I mean, here you have a prestigious law firm plotting the murder of its own lawyers and fronting for the Mafia. The legal profession thinks of this as a crisis.''
To deal with the situation, the American Bar Association recently decided to allocate a half-million dollars for a public relations blitz to polish the tarnished image of lawyers. The spin doctors will have their work cut out for them. As St. Louis attorney Michael Kahn plaintively mused in Weisenhaus' journal, ``The Firm'' can't make things any worse.
``I don't think it's going to have an impact at all,'' said Kahn of the film. ``It's like libel - you have to prove you have a good reputation in the first place.''
Pollack has a lot of fun following McDeere through his ethical and emotional dilemmas in a slick production blessed with a splendid supporting cast. He pleads innocence, however, to indiscriminate lawyer-bashing.
``You don't say that you're making a film about all lawyers,'' Pollack said in an interview in New York last month. When he made "Absence of Malice,'' a film about an unethical reporter (Sally Field), said Pollock, ``journalists tried to have me drawn and quartered. I tried to explain to these people that you're not saying that every journalist is like that any more than when you do a film about a bad cop you're saying all cops are bad.
``The same thing is true here. There are a lot of great lawyers in the world, but there are also a lot of rats.''
To all the old American prejudices against lawyers, Pollack adds a new one. The malpractice specialist can be particularly loathsome, he says. Health care is ``practically unaffordable now,'' the director argues, ``because there are all these guys who know they can win lawsuits for really no reason and advertise for it.''
``You can round up all the usual suspects when it comes to [identifying those who tarnished]our image,'' said Charles Brandt, a former chief deputy attorney general for Delaware, now in private practice and the author of the highly praised legal thriller ``The Right to Remain Silent.'' ``But I think when lawyers were allowed to advertise, it was a real cheapening thing.''
In the last decade, shabby attorneys on the big screen have threatened to expand what we mean when we say ``criminal lawyer.'' Here is just a sampling:
In ``Suspect'' (1987), public defender Cher winds up in bed with Dennis Quaid, a juror in the case she is trying.
In ``The Star Chamber'' (1983), Hal Holbrook and a group of fellow rogue judges arrange for the murder of criminals who have gotten off on technicalities.
In Spielberg's ``Hook'' (1991), Robin Williams is a middle-aged Peter Pan who has turned into a hopelessly workaholic corporate lawyer. He's so busy he sends an assistant to videotape his son's baseball game rather than attend himself.
In ``Body of Evidence'' (1993), defense attorney Willem Dafoe plans his courtroom strategy by having client Madonna drip candle wax over his bare torso.
In ``The Verdict'' (1982), Paul Newman is an alcoholic lawyer who commits grave breaches of ethics in representing a victim in a malpractice suit. But he's a paragon of virtue compared to the film's suavely villainous lawyer James Mason, described by an admirer as ``Darth Vader in a three-piece suit.''
In ``Presumed Innocent'' (1990), the most successful of the recent lawyer films, married prosecutor Harrison Ford has an affair with a colleague and is then charged with her murder.
In ``My Cousin Vinny'' (1992), Joe Pesci is a woeful incompetent as a lawyer who becomes the defense counsel in a murder case even though he's never handled so much as a traffic ticket.
The models of legal probity who stalked the hallways in ``Judgment at Nuremberg'' or fought for what was just in ``The Caine Mutiny'' and ``Anatomy of a Murder'' would cringe at this police blotter lineup. But you can at least say that contemporary screen lawyers are, for all their flaws and ongoing exploration of the seven deadly sins, more interesting as people than previous decades' defenders of truth, justice and the American way.
And whether he's a convenient caricature, such as T. Rex's lunch in ``Jurassic Park,'' or a riveting and well-rounded character, such as Ford's Rusty Sabich in ``Presumed Innocent,'' the lawyer is on screen for a good reason.
``Movies show people what they want to see,'' said John Denvir, a University of San Francisco law school professor now editing a book on the subject, ``Legal Reelism: The Hollywood Movie as Legal Text.''
``The lawyer is the symbol of the greed of the Reagan-Bush years. I find one of the most interesting things about the image is the way my students feel about it. They're very ambivalent,'' said Denvir. ``They don't like to be seen that way as people, but they do seem to like being viewed as powerful people. You'll also find that most lawyer jokes are told by lawyers.''
Lawyers may feel they deserve a break, or at least a recess, but it won't be coming soon. Jonathan Demme is putting the finishing touches on ``Philadelphia,'' about a firm that tries to fire one of its lawyers when its discovered he has AIDS, and Julia Roberts is now filming Grisham's ``The Pelican Brief,'' which revolves around a plot to assassinate justices of the U.S. Surpeme Court.
The law profession is only getting what it has wrought, says Pollock.
``They're a fairly easy target because they're an elite group, a special- interest group, if you will'' he said. ``They're powerful and we need them, and all that conspires to make us resent them.''
by CNB