The Client movie review & film summary (1994)

The creation of these two characters is at the heart of Grisham's accomplishment in "The Client." They are original and genuinely interesting, and the roles have been cast well. Brad Renfro is a movie newcomer who seems to be a natural actor. He's from Knoxville, Tenn., inexperienced except for school productions, but he has an unforced conviction and a lot of backbone and provides a strong center for the film.

As Reggie Love, the filmmakers cast Sarandon, who is also right for the role: weary and world-worn, but tough, and warm enough to understand her client's difficult emotional needs. She has a special reason for earning the boy's trust: Earlier in her imperfect life, she lost custody of her own children.

Against these heroes, the movie provides two categories of villains. There are the corrupt gangsters and politicians who fear the young boy will destroy them with information. And there is Roy Foltrigg (Tommy Lee Jones), a publicity-seeking federal prosecutor nicknamed "Reverend" because of his penchant for quoting scripture at press conferences, often inaccurately.

If Grisham is good at creating original, believable characters, he is all too good at dreaming up bizarre situations to place them in. His astonishing writing career is well-known by now: How the Southern lawyer began to write fiction in his spare time and within a few years became the nation's best-selling author. He can write, to be sure. But his plots sometimes seem amateurish and overcontrived, and anyone who could follow all of the events in "The Firm" (1993) should probably share their explanation with the rest of us as a public service.

In "The Client," Grisham's story provides a starting point for some quietly realistic, emotionally convincing scenes for director Joel Schumacher ("Flatliners," "Falling Down"). But in the last hour the action wanders less convincingly into Hardy Boys antics where the kid and his lawyer turn into amateur sleuths and risk their lives to solve the big case.

Much depends on the whereabouts of a missing body - which, if it can be produced, will overthrow an evil cabal of gangsters, mob lawyers and politicians. After Mark and Reggie find the body, at great but unconvincing risk, the movie concludes with such unseemly haste that Foltrigg calls a press conference to boast of the location of the body before he has even gone to see for himself if it is there. At moments like this, the movie betrays its willingness to go for effect at the cost of credibility, and like other Grisham plots this one doesn't really stand up to close examination.

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