The Chamber (1996) * * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Starts off as a legal thriller, but mutates into something much closer to the heart -- and features Gene Hackman in a typically excellent performance.
Some movies lead you wrong, and that's a good thing. THE CHAMBER, adapted from the John Grishamn novel, starts off as a typical legal-thriller-with-a-twist, but then slowly turns into a different sort of story, about one man trying to find the truth about the past and another man trying to find the truth about himself.
The two men are Adam Hall, a young Chicago laywer, and his grandfather, Sam Cayhall. Cayhall is a product of the worst breeds of Southern racism, in whose fold he built and detonated several bombs. "I never meant to kill anyone," he repeats angrily, but bombs are generally not designed to do much else, and three trials and countless appeals later, he is now on death row. Hall, his grandson, has decided to take on the eleventh-hour defense.
Hall and Cayhill do not like each other. Cayhill has no use for lawyers -- most of the reasons, it seems at first, are blatantly racist, and don't bear repeating here (even though they are delivered with consummate skill by Hackman). Hall doesn't like the bitter old man, but he smells a great deal is being held away from a lot of people's noses here, and digs. He finds a lot.
As the movie unwound, I felt it could have gone one of two ways: either it could have developed the plot to the point where the human story became more irrelevant and therefore could be resolved with a mechanical flourish (the way the dreadful A TIME TO KILL ended up), or it could pay closer attention to the people in the story. It takes the second road, and is all the better for it. And be warned: as a result, we don't get a nice, tidy conclusion -- a lot of threads are left dangling, probably deliberately, since the real conclusion of the movie is in the way Hackman's character handles his oncoming fate. Eventually we see that his racism is not so much a philosophy as a way of warding off terrible grief and hurt, and self-hatred (as is the case with most virulently racist people, they compensate violently for not having what they feel should be simply given to them gratis).
Hall (played by Chris O'Donnell with maturity and grace) also has a transformation of his own, but a smaller one: sometimes it's not possible to use the law as a way to repair what has gone wrong, just to comment on it. He resents his grandfather for using the same tired excuses, but at the same time batters patiently at the man's defenses, knowing that it's only a matter of time before the imminence of the clock will get him to say something true to his heart. He does.
A lot of people have criticized THE CHAMBER as being unfocused, but I think the focus is deceptive. It's not really about its plot; it's about the way the people tangled up in it deal with it -- or do not deal with it, as the case may be. On that level, it's a very different movie, and a better one, than we might have been initially led to believe.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei [new email address coming soon] ICQ: 934998 http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... NEW WEB SITE: http://cablehouse.dyn.ml.org ...and the mandate of heaven you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth
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