… and Action!
Following up on last month’s article about the film A Time to Kill, this article will look at another film adaption of a book by author John Grisham. The former attorney is well known for his legal thrillers, and The Firm was the first one to make it to the big screen.
As one of the top students in his class, it appears that Harvard graduate Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is the incomparable of the season. After all, the beginning of the film is dedicated to conveying this impression by showing job interviews with an abundance of prestigious law firms. The offices of Bendini, Lambert & Locke are the lucky winner; they made such an excessive offer that McDeere could not possibly have refused. The young lawyer and his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) relocate to Memphis, not without causing marital problems. After a few weeks of working overtime, McDeere begins to doubt his decision. This intensifies when he starts to ask the wrong questions, and his suspicions spark a tale of espionage with the involvement of the FBI. Beginning to reveal the firm’s secrets, McDeere is forced to remember why he became a lawyer in the first place.
The Firm is full of tension, twists and turns with more action elements than other legal thrillers. This article will consider if the film possibly lost some of its accuracy by concentrating more on those action elements than on the legal elements.
Law Firm Diversity
Nowadays, a law firm would not look anything like portrayed in The Firm. Bendini, Lambert & Locke employs some 40 attorneys, all of whom are white males who are married. Some of the firm’s policies are more than inappropriate and leave a bitter taste to an audience watching The Firm in 2021, such as the ‘no divorcees, no bachelors’ policy. In fact, data suggests that the divorce rate amongst lawyers is almost 27%, showing that the firm’s policies would neither uphold in reality nor withstand the test of time.
Another eyebrow-raising example are the misogynous beliefs shared amongst the firm’s partners. These become apparent in a conversation between Abby and one of the other wives. She is told that the firm does not forbid their attorneys’ wives to work. However, in order to promote stability, the law firm encourages their employees to have many children. Why any employer would feel like it is acceptable to overstep boundaries like that is incomprehensible.
The lack of female and BAME representation at Bendini, Lambert & Locke is not contemporary either. In the United Kingdom, for instance, 49% of lawyers are women and 21% of lawyers are BAME. While the law firm did have one female employee in its history (hooray!), she died before the start of the film under mysterious circumstances.
Corruption and Ruthlessness
The Firm adds to the common misconception that most lawyers are crooked liars who only care about money and seem to have discarded their morals from the second they practised law for the first time. Then again, these misconceptions partially exist because of the misrepresentation of the legal industry in media and films in the first place.
Early on in the film, McDeere receives the somewhat sketchy advice by one of the firm’s partners to bend the law as far as he can without breaking it. This does not really encourage an audience to put their trust in lawyers. The film also suggests that legal ethics, such as client confidentiality, are “designed to protect the lawyers and the crooks.”
That being said, the overbilling of clients, and other bad practices as portrayed in the film, do not only happen on the cinema screen. In order for such a sham to be successful, it is very likely that all the partners would be privy to it as is the case in the film, where even most associates are in on the secret. Overall, however, these are rare and exceptional cases that diverge from the norm.
McDeere himself is lead astray by various temptations throughout the film. By rigorously adhering to the law and legal ethics, he finds a way to neither break not bend the law. Yet, he does not emerge as a hero, as morally speaking his actions are very questionable.
Final Thoughts
As addressed in this article, there are many things The Firm does not get quite right, many of which seem very outdated from today’s perspective. Nevertheless, the action scenes and the attempt to predict the outcome of the film make it an enjoyable experience. The ending is ambivalent as it is both satisfying and frustrating at the same time.
Comentários