Friday, 2 July 2004
Runaway Jury
When I was younger, I used to love watching "L.A. Law." I'm not sure why, maybe I was just a glutton for punishment. But in that case, there must be a lot of gluttons for punishment - at least in the U.S. The guts of law, after the real guts shown in medical dramas, seem to draw people's attention like few other dramatic situations.
Maybe it's not too surprising: the Romans had their gladiatorial combats. What else, if not our modern bread and circus, is a showdown in a courtroom? Authors like John Grisham seem to smell the blood in the water, and they've tracked it with some success.
While I like watching courtroom drama, I'm not impelled to buy the books. So it's hardly surprising that I walked into Runaway Jury, the proverbial blank slate.
Not that it took me too long to guess what was going on: a dramatic thriller, with some pretty decent dramatic tension going on, and some high-tech goodies thrown in for good measure (James Bond, what have you done to us?). And it took little longer to see why this particular film got made.
Superman fought for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" (at least on TV, which had added the latter third to what would have normally been a sufficient "truth and justice"). Besides "the American Way," Don Quixote also fought for the exact same principles. Is there anything more noble than that? Not to mention, anything more passé, quaint, outmoded - and just plain naive?
The modern public is jaded, at least the public that ingests enough mass media. There's no surprise that the media, with the willing (if not passive) participation of the public, has shaped the public to be that way. Sex scandals, policy outrages, abuses of power, graft, betrayal - from the local grocer to the President of the United States himself, everyone is doing something that they shouldn't be doing. And - were it not for apparently accidental discoveries - they would have gotten away with it, too. ("Those meddling kids!")
So we sit in front of that law drama, and we so want to root for the good guy. But who is the good guy? The prosecution? Maybe: the mourning family of an innocent killed by an illegal gun (or cigarettes, in the original novel) is certainly sympathetic. The defense? Probably not: they're portrayed as ghoulish profiteers, more cynical than even we, the audience.
But as the saying goes, the only winners in a courtroom are the lawyers. And I don't think there's a single audience member who is going to root for the lawyer, only slightly more trusted than a scorpion in a sleeping bag. How can you have your battle, when you'd really like to see both gladiators fed straight to the lions?
Well, guess what: the lion is the good guy. And that's where innocent-faced John Cusak comes in. The juror, out to beat the lawyers at their own game.
I'm pretty tired of the crook-as-hero genre, whether the crook is a simple schmuck or a dashing gentleman. Cusak, and his "outside man," Rachel Weisz, are somewhere in between. But as predictable as their motives were, I did find myself enjoying the plot as the onion layers peeled away.
Due credit has to be given to Gene Hackman, an amazing actor who I think is woefully under-cast in Hollywood. This is an actor who I can see on any side of an argument, and wouldn't be surprised to find myself believing in his passion - whatever the situation. Dustin Hoffman puts in a decent day on the job as well, with a mix of Willy Loman's doggedness and Benjamin Braddock's earnestness.
It was hard to swallow the happy ending, even if everything had been so perfectly constructed for you to feel happy. The craftsmanship and the thought that went into the structure was impressive, much like some newly completed bank headquarters. And, like I said, I enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game that kept me on my toes, something I wasn't entirely expecting from yet another "bad is the new good" story.
But in a testament to my true nature - and, I imagine, to the nature of the rest of the audience from whom this tale had been so carefully crafted - it was the thing that went wrong that gave me the most satisfaction in the end. Hackman's breakdown - just as inevitable as the Tower of Babel - was a majestic thing to witness.
It's a true sign of a master architect to purposely appeal to his public's baser instincts while leaving intact the core values of his work. Runaway Jury gives us our "bad guy" protagonists a clean getaway, and rains down the full fury of the Fates upon the carefully constructed "evil nemesis."
4 / 5 - Guilty satisfaction? Guilty as charged! But at least you don't have to disengage your brain.