The Client Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Client Blu-ray Movie Review

"Stop Calling Me the Child!"

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 16, 2012

The Client is three quarters of a great movie, but that three quarters is enough to elevate it above every film adapted to date from the legal thrillers of John Grisham. A prolific author of airplane reading, Grisham writes improbable potboilers peopled by two-dimensional characters and decorated with just enough legalese and surface decor to lend the whole enterprise an air of authenticity. But take the stories from page to screen, and their true nature is revealed: They are pre-fab scripts, waiting for Hollywood to fit tab "A" into slot "B" and insert big star "C" guided by established director "D".

The Firm (1993) succeeded by following the template with Tom Cruise directed by Sydney Pollack. Never mind that the titular law firm never once looked or behaved credibly, because Pollack understood that the legal rigamarole didn't matter, as long as his star was in danger. Then Alan Pakula's The Pelican Brief (1993) put Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington at the mercy of a sinister D.C. establishment with an oil billionaire for a client. Forget the fact that sleek Washington firms make more money by not assassinating Supreme Court Justices, murdering FBI counsel or detonating reporters in their cars, because Pakula made sure that Roberts and Washington looked good while running for their lives.

But something different happened with The Client when it was handed to Joel Schumacher, who was just a year away from taking over Tim Burton's Batman franchise (and arguably ruining it forever). Schumacher's talent has always vacillated between the earnest and the frivolous, and The Client caught him in a serious phase. With a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) and Robert Getchell (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), this particular Grisham film morphed from a thriller into a character study. All of a sudden, Grisham acquired depth. The stellar cast was anchored by Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon (in a justly Oscar-nominated performance) and the newly discovered Brad Renfro, whose exceptional work here should not be clouded by the later problems with substance abuse that eventually led to his death.

Mark and Ricky Sway (Renfro and David Speck) are the sons of a single working mom, Dianne (Mary-Louise Parker), who would be considered by many to be "trailer trash". Indeed, the family lives in a trailer in Memphis. One day when the brothers are out in the woods smoking their mother's cigarettes, they witness the suicide of a despairing criminal lawyer, Jerome "Romey" Clifford (Walter Olkiewicz). It's a tense, sharply edited and smartly directed sequence, because it generates suspense, while also speaking volumes about the relationship between the two brothers. The relationship is essential to everything Mark does for the rest of the film.

Ricky, the younger brother, is so traumatized by Romey's suicide that he withdraws into a coma-like trance. Memphis police and FBI lock down the scene, because Romey was a mob lawyer, whose client, "Barry the Blade" Muldano (Anthony LaPaglia), is the chief suspect in the disappearance and presumed murder of Louisiana Senator Boyd Boyette. The flamboyant U.S. Attorney in New Orleans, "Reverend Roy" Foltrigg (Jones), was hoping to "flip" Romey into testifying against his client, but whatever Romey knew died with him—unless he told someone before he put a bullet through his head. An insinuating Memphis cop, Sgt. Hardy (Will Patton), thinks that Mark Sway learned a lot more from Romey than he's letting on. A local FBI man, McThune (J.T. Walsh), agrees.

As Ricky Sway lies in a hospital bed, and his doctor (William H. Macy) doses Dianne Sway with valium to prevent a nervous collapse, Sgt. Hardy intimidates Mark with tales of the fearsome Reverend Roy and "kid size" electric chairs. But Hardy achieves the opposite effect: Mark runs out of the hospital looking for a lawyer. Clutching the address of an ambulance chaser he spotted hustling an accident victim in the lobby, Mark runs into a nearby building and blunders into the office of Reggie Love (Sarandon). A classic Grisham underdog, Reggie has only been in practice a few years, but together with her clerk, Clint (Anthony Edwards), she's won "more 'n' I lost". Despite a rocky start, Mark has found a lawyer.

When Reggie first marches into a conference room to confront McThune, Reverend Roy and his entourage (an assistant U.S. attorney (Bradley Whitford), a New Orleans FBI man (Anthony Heald) and a personal assistant (William Sanderson)), the scene exemplifies what makes The Client's legal sequences compelling. There's strategic maneuvering between the two sides, but the real drama is the interplay of personalities, as Reggie switches between Southern lady and professional shark, while the men in the room go from Confederate gentlemen to bad boys caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The same dynamic continues as Reverend Roy and his minions tighten the screws on Reggie and Mark, threatening, cajoling, fabricating grounds for putting Mark in custody, and finally hauling him before Judge Harry Roosevelt (Ossie Davis) so that they can examine him under oath. The issue becomes less a matter of catching criminals than about Mark sticking to his principles without violating his promise to Reggie not to lie. (The solution is inventive, elegant and technically accurate.) Reverend Roy isn't above trying to sabotage Reggie's relationship with her client by slipping Mark unflattering details about Reggie's past.

At regular intervals, the crime story has to be serviced; so we check in with Barry the Blade and his boss and uncle, Johnny Sulari (Ron Dean), who is none too pleased with Barry. Uncle Johnny dispatches a thug named Gronke (Kim Coates) to intimidate Mark (and more, if necessary), but these scenes of mob plotting and coercion, which would normally be the meat of the story, end up being the filler. Schumacher and his editor, Robert Brown (who had cut The Lost Boys, Flatliners and Dying Young for the director), wisely speed through them as fast as possible to get back to the heart of the film, which is the growing relationship between Reggie and young Mark.

Eventually, though, the rickety frame that is the downfall of every Grisham-based thriller can no longer be concealed. Having beaten back all of Reverend Roy's attacks, Reggie and Mark are in an ideal position to make a deal, and Reggie even lays out how to do it: Go to Reverend Roy and insist on immunity for Mark and witness protection for him and his family in exchange for what Romey told him, which is where to find the body of Barry the Blade's victim, the late Senator Boyette. But a funny thing always happens with Grisham's heroes. In the crunch, they never behave like lawyers; they always have to get out of the office and turn into action stars. So Reggie lets Mark talk her into following the insane course of confirming the body's location, which there's no need to do, except that it puts both lawyer and client into jeopardy and turns the last part of of The Client into a series of low-key stunts and escapes. You can actually feel the film deflating as it downshifts into the mundane routine of Confronting the Bad Guy (which turns out to be not much of a confrontation after all). An extended scene between Reggie and Reverend Roy when they finally meet to strike a deal provides a welcome return to form, but by then the spell has been broken.

The Client Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

British cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts shot The Client the year before shooting Disclosure for Barry Levinson. Warner's Blu- ray presentation of the latter film was somewhat disappointing, but the 1080p, AVC-encoded image for The Client is sensational. Detail never falters, whether in close shots or wide. Black levels are solid and finely delineated, allowing for excellent shadows in locations like the nighttime hospital corridors, stairwells and amphitheaters where Mark finds himself wandering (or fleeing). Colors are rich without oversaturation, and the southern locales are suggestively represented by an appropriately warm palette. High frequency filtering, artificial sharpening or compression artifacts were nowhere to be seen.

The Client Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Believe it or not, in 1994 not every major studio film was released with discrete 5.1 sound. The Client's original format was two-channel Dolby Surround, and previous DVD releases have all been DD 2.0. The Blu-ray offers lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, and the results are quite satisfying. Voices are clear, effects are well-defined, and when played through a surround decoder such as DPL IIx, the track produces an immersive sense of ambiance that is effective for such environments as the hospital stairwells, the mob waterfront headquarters and the lakeside boathouse that plays a critical role in the film's final section. The score by Howard Shore isn't typical of Shore's output, but it suits the material and sounds fine.

The Client Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Client 1995 TV Pilot (480i; 1.33:1; 1:31:32): A TV series adaptation of The Client ran for a single season on CBS from 1995-1996. This was the two-hour pilot. JoBeth Williams played Reggie Love, with Roy Foltrigg now reconceived as the local district attorney and played by Jon Heard. Ossie Davis' Judge Roosevelt was the sole carryover from the film. The pilot attempts to replicate many of the elements in the film, as Reggie becomes the court-appointed attorney for a boy who witnessed a murder connected to a casino robbery.



• Theatrical Trailer (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 2:04): "Did you ever hear of obstruction of justice, Mark?"

The Client Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

"Why should he talk if we can't protect him?" asks Reggie of Judge Roosevelt, who never answers the question. The lawyer-client relationship is supposed to be built on trust and rarely is, but trust is central to the relationships at the heart of The Client. Little Ricky Sway trusts his brother Mark and ends up in a coma. Mark's guilt from that event makes him determined to protect his mother and brother, but he finds that he cannot do so without help from a legal system that has betrayed him on every prior contact (and is already trying to trip him up now). The lawyer he ends up trusting wouldn't have been his first choice, but she turns out to be ideal for the job. Highly recommended.