Pelican Brief, The (1993)

reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

The Pelican Brief (1993)
* * 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Good, workmanlike adaptation of Grisham's novel, but the joy of discovery is gone.

John Grisham writes solid, workmanlike novels which get translated into movies of dizzyingly varied quality. THE PELICAN BRIEF, directed by Alan Pakula, is one of the better ones, but it's limited by the strangely one-sided screenplay. A thriller should allow us to participate in the puzzle being unscrambled onscreen; this one shuts us out, and instead gives us too much manufactured suspense.

Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts) is a legal student down south, and her mentor and lover Tom Callahan (Sam Shepard, very nice) are both confused about the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices. On a lark, Shaw tries to figure out why two men of such disparate persuasions were killed -- but the more she uncovers, the more serious she gets, and soon she's assembled an amateur legal brief that purports to have the answers. Then the brief falls into the wrong hands, and she's targeted for death. She runs -- one of the nice things in the movie is that she is not stupid, and knows better than to do things that leave a trail, like use credit cards -- and winds up crossing paths with Gray Grantham (Denzel Washington), a journalist who has done jail time for not jeopardizing his sources.

This leads us to the movie's big problem, which is that up until about the halfway mark, we're almost totally in the dark about what the mystery is. Then we get it -- all in one gigantic, clumsy expositional lump. This tactic irritated me, because I could see no end of opportunities earlier on to deploy the same information in small daubs -- and allow us to fit everything together.

The movie is not stupid, though . There are many good touches, especially whenever Grantham's journalistic ethics and his boss (a wonderful John Lithgow) are concerned. One of my pet peeves is the way journalism (or computer techonlogy, or the military) are represented in the movies, and this one gets it mostly right: one scene with Washington and Lithgow arguing about the factuality of a source has enough tension in it to propel a movie all by itself. The thriller plot is well-oiled and unfolds nicely, even if it is jury-rigged. And we get a gallery of good-to-excellent performances. I don't normally think much of Julia Roberts, but she did well by me in this one, and Denzel Washington is never less than great. There's also one piece of cinematography -- a scene of someone being gunned down by a sniper -- that I will not soon forget.

But because we're not allowed to participate in any of the assembly of the evidence from the start, we get only to watch passively, and instead get the contrivances of an assassin (Stanley Tucci, really creepy) and many other scenes that don't add up to much. I wanted THE PELICAN BRIEF to add up to a lot more, but it worked against itself in far too many ways.

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