THE PELICAN BRIEF
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1993 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Culp, John Lithgow. Screenplay/Director: Alan J. Pakula. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
THE PELICAN BRIEF has a lot in common with this summer's THE FIRM. Of course, both are based on uberbestsellers by John Grisham, but the similarities run deeper than that. THE FIRM starred Hollywood's most marketable male star, Tom Cruise; THE PELICAN BRIEF grabbed the most marketable female star, Julia Roberts. Both were directed by "prestige" directors, and both were constructed from the "slicker is better" model of thriller-making. In short, THE PELICAN BRIEF might as well *be* THE FIRM: an overlong, over-plotted, instantly forgettable entertainment sporadically enlivened by decent supporting performances. Unfortunately, it doesn't have Gene Hackman.
THE PELICAN BRIEF opens with the assassination of two Supreme Court justices who appear to have little in common, one an aging liberal and the other a young conservative. However, a possible link is discovered by Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts), a law student at Tulane University. Through her law professor/lover Thomas Callahan (Sam Shepard), Darby's theory, which comes to be known as "The Pelican Brief," is circulated in Washington. Among its implications are possible connections between the assassinations and the president (Robert Culp), and suddenly people start turning up dead. A frightened Darby turns to Gray Grantham (Denzel Washington), a White House reporter investigating the assassinations, and soon the two are running for their lives, desperately searching for proof of their theory before they too are added to the growing body count.
Technically, THE PELICAN BRIEF is just fine. Director Alan J. Pakula (ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, PRESUMED INNOCENT) knows how to ratchet up the tension, using pull-back crane shots to heighten the sense of paranoia. James Horner's score works well, even if it does depend overmuch on dissonant piano chords and wood block percussion. The problem with THE PELICAN BRIEF, the movie, is the same thing that's wrong with THE PELICAN BRIEF, the book: there's not a single interesting or original thing happening, either from a story or character perspective. The big conspiracy at the heart of the story is both insipid and insulting to one's intelligence. It's impossible to accept that no one considered the possibility of spacing out the assassinations, or being slightly more creative than putting a bullet in the head of a man who was on a respirator. There's only one possible reason for such stupidity: there wouldn't have been anything for a clever law student to sniff out. It's equally ludicrous to suggest that no one else in Federal law enforcement would have considered the possibilities Darby Shaw comes up with. Grisham's story is loaded with implausibilities and the payoff it offers for accepting them is simply not worth it.
The characters in Pakula's adaptation don't fare much better. Julia Roberts chose Darby Shaw as her first role in two years, but it's difficult to figure out why. There is not a shred of back story, nothing to suggest why she pursues the assassination story, nothing to make her anything but a positively bland lady in distress. To her credit, Roberts' reaction to an explosion is gripping, and she's thoroughly convincing at suggesting dazed trauma, but dazed and traumatized is about as fara as this role goes. Denzel Washington, one of the most talented and charismatic leading men around, has an equally blank slate with Gray Grantham; somehow he manages to act circles around a part where there's really nothing there. Up and down the cast it's the same story: Tony Goldwyn is the President's shadowy Chief of Staff; John Lithgow is Washington's skeptical editor; Stanley Tucci is the icy killer. Only Hume Cronyn, in a single scene as the aging justice Rosenberg, has any spark. No one else has a thing to work with.
THE FIRM was no piece of art, but at least its characters were reasonably fleshed out for the screen. THE PELICAN BRIEF asked me to sit through nearly two and a half hours of repetitive chases involving people I didn't care about. A third Grisham adaptation, THE CLIENT, is on its way next year. I suppose it's too much to ask that he's learned to write an interesting story by now.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 pelicans: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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