A TIME TO KILL
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Brenda Fricker, Oliver Platt, Charles S. Dutton, Ashley Judd. Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman. Director: Joel Schumacher. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw. Opens Wednesday, July 24 in wide release.
This just in: Matthew McConaughey has already won the 1997 Best Actor Oscar, will be on the cover of every magazine published in the English language, and has been named Time's Man of the Year. Those suggestions should be absurd, but the way Warner Bros. is pushing John Grisham's anointed one, they're merely the next logical step. It's one thing to be the Flavor of the Month, but McConaughey has become the Flavor of Next Month, a star without a previous starring role. That's a rather unfair burden to place on an actor, but now that A TIME TO KILL is finally here, it looks like the talent is up to the hype. Leading an exceptional cast, Matthew McConaughey helps create some riveting moments in an occasionally melodramatic story.
McConaughey plays Jake Brigance, a young lawyer in Canton, Mississippi struggling to keep his practice afloat. With bills to pay and a family to support, Jake needs a big case, and he is about to find one. Following the rape of a 10-year-old black girl by two white men, the girl's father, Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson) guns the two men down before their arraignment, and now faces first-degree murder charges. And if it isn't bad enough that Hailey is a black man accused of murdering two white men, he faces an ambitious district attorney (Kevin Spacey) who is cozy with the trial judge (Patrick McGoohan). Jake takes the case, assisted only by law student Ellen Roark (Sandra Bullock), but a lack of resources may be the least of his problems when the brother of one of the murdered men (Kiefer Sutherland) sets out to teach Jake -- and anyone close to him -- a lesson.
There is a fundamental problem which prevents A TIME TO KILL from being a truly exceptional film, and it comes down to three letters: KKK. White supremacists are the Nazis of the 90s; film makers love them because they know we love to hate them, and because they don't have to worry about anyone protesting if they are portrayed as hissable cartoons. But somehow it detracts from the racial tensions at the heart of A TIME TO KILL to have cross-burning, linen-wearing good ol' boys at the center of them. There are plenty of complex issues involved in the story of A TIME TO KILL, foremost among them the criminal justice system's entrenched racial inequities, but director Joel Schumacher and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Akiva Goldsman can't resist the impulse to be crowd-pleasers, providing plenty of moments for audience members to applaud Klansmen being beaten, spit upon, arrested or otherwise mocked, all underscored by Elliot Goldenthal's strident strings.
It is too bad that A TIME TO KILL needed the sneering evil and repetitive cruelty of overt racists like Sutherland's character, and even the poorly developed sub-plot involving the involvement of the NAACP, because it is so much better at exploring its more three-dimensional characters. Samuel L. Jackson is superb as Carl Lee, a shaken man trying to get some small piece of his life back. Goldsman gives him a great speech late in the film in which he forces Jake to confront his own racist feelings, and what makes Jackson's delivery so potent is that there is so little anger in it; he has come to an understanding of the gulf race places between them. Sandra Bullock, given an extremely misleading first billing, turns in what may be her best work yet as the cocky legal prodigy who smells a ticket to notoriety in the much-publicized case, and there are memorable supporting turns by Oliver Platt (as a lovably unscrupulous friend and colleague of Jake's) and Chris Cooper (as a sheriff's deputy caught in Carl Lee's line of fire) among a handful of others. A TIME TO KILL is exceedingly well cast, and the performances sparkle.
Then there is Matthew McConaughey. He is being compared to everyone from Paul Newman to Marlon Brando to Kevin Costner, but none of those comparisons really does justice to his unique appeal. There is an absolute ease to his acting which you almost never see in actors his age (McConaughey is a ripe old 26), along with a screen presence you rarely see in actors of any age. His Jake is a bit of an idealist and a bit of a scoundrel; it's hard to get inside his head, but it's easy to like him. And in a film which features a few too many loud and obvious scenes, McConaughey is absolutely electrifying in a scene which is emotionally crippling in its quiet power: Jake describing the rape of Carl Lee's daughter to the jury in graphic detail. It is almost possible to accept that Spacey's savvy prosecutor doesn't object to the obviously inflammatory remarks. Perhaps he, like us, was simply transfixed by witnessing the birth of a star.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 opening statements: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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