Why have we lost interest in legal thrillers?
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By MELISSA OLSON
Thursday, October 18, 2007 10:22 AM CDT
For the Herald
I stopped liking John Grisham just a little bit before everyone else did.
Oh, I read the Client. And The Firm, and Runaway Jury, and all the rest. I even saw the movies (well, most of them). And, along with the rest of the country, I began to anxiously await each new John Grisham novel.
Until, right around the time of “The Partner,” I began to suspect what was quickly confirmed: John Grisham had started phoning it in. After such a huge measure of success, the guy no longer needed to actually craft thoughtful, dramatically intricate legal thrillers.
It was enough to just turn in a chunk of typed paper and collect an equally large chunk of cash. It was honestly like John Grisham himself just started saying, “Eh, why bother, when I can just wait for the movie?” Pretty soon, we all caught on, and then Grisham’s sales dropped. He stopped writing the same kind of books, and the studios ran out of legal thrillers to adapt.
The once-mighty legal TV show suffered, too: Ally McBeal and The Practice were cancelled, the Law and Order machine began to falter, and new shows started following more of a “Lost” or “Desperate Housewives” kind of mold. (I was actually shocked to discover the other day that “Boston Legal” is still on. Shocked.)
So, is it all John Grisham’s fault? Nah, not really. At the same time his movie-books went stale, our interest was shifting to other things: remakes of Japanese horror films, gross-out humor, comic book movies. And as we turned our attention to epic action, Pixar, and political drama, we all forgot about why we ever got into legal thrillers in the first place.
But I’ve been thinking about that lately, about why we used to love these courtroom stories. George Clooney’s newest film, “Michael Clayton,” is exactly the kind of story that John Grisham would have written 15 years ago.
The movie is about a law firm’s “fixer,” (Clooney), the guy who gets sent in to clean up all the dirty messes that clients make: drunk driving, hit-and-run, public intoxication and so on.
But when he’s sent to “fix” a lawyer friend who’s been stuck on a lengthy civil case, Clayton stumbles (or, because it’s Clooney, suavely glides) into a much bigger fixer-upper than he imagined.
“Michael Clayton” reminded me a lot of last year’s underappreciated “Fracture,” which recently came out on video. The story is different — “Fracture” follows a hotshot young DA trying to hurriedly clear his last case so he can move up to the big leagues — but the two movies both swirl around the same idea: a man with questionable behavior trying to claw his way back to morality.
Watching these two films, I realized that these stories didn’t just become popular because John Grisham has a good marketing team. One of the greatest qualities of movies is their ability to raise questions, to start discussions about values, principles, the line between right and wrong. And there are few better places to raise those discussions than in a courtroom, the ultimate playing field to explore morality. It’s a setting that makes sense to us, that we can relate to, because it’s where our own real-life battles play out.
And yet, we’ve almost entirely stopped making movies like these. “Fracture,” an excellent, suspenseful little film, made very little money. “Michael Clayton” opened in fourth place last weekend, and is sure to fall lower in the ranks as bigger, more eye-popping movies muscle their way into theaters this weekend.
The legal thriller — or courtroom drama, whatever you want to call it — is looking more and more like an endangered species. And I have to ask: what does that say about us? What does it mean when we’re more interested in horror and heroes than we are in the human psyche?
Go see “Michael Clayton.” Rent “Fracture.” And think about them in terms of what they’re saying, not just what they’re doing.
Or, if all else fails, you can always check out some vintage Grisham.
Melissa Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in film and television, and works in Madison for the television program Discover Wisconsin. E-mail comments and questions to Melissa at mfo.usc@gmail.com.
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