How Far You Want It Bent

It’s now well over thirty years since the blockbuster success of THE FIRM, which seems crazy to think about both in terms of how much time has gone by but also how a film like this was once the big July 4th weekend release, June 30, 1993 to be exact. And when it was made, THE FIRM was clearly designed to be a hit. An adaptation of a runaway best seller, the biggest star in the world, a respected director, some of the best character actors around plus a crew of screenwriters who were likely punching below their weight considering the material and anything less than a giant smash would have been considered a failure. For the now much-missed director Sydney Pollack this was his follow-up to the colossal failure of 1990’s HAVANA, a movie that no one has ever had much excitement about, then or now. But in response to what happened there he clearly recognized that what he needed to do was get back on the horse and make a movie that people wanted to see, doing the things that he did, if not best, then at least very well. 1993 was a big summer with JURASSIC PARK plus the likes of SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE and IN THE LINE OF FIRE but THE FIRM was bigger than all the ones without dinosaurs, at least until THE FUGITIVE opened a month later, marking the start of the run of John Grisham adaptations to follow over the next few years. Francis Ford Coppola’s film of THE RAINMAKER may be the best of that batch, finding a surprising amount of pure emotion and empathy in the material but THE FIRM is very likely the most purely enjoyable in a Chinese takeout sort of way. And I suspect the people who made THE FIRM knew that it was Chinese takeout but they made it really good Chinese takeout, at least for the night you watch it, preferably with some really good Chinese takeout which seems fitting considering how much the two lead characters yearn for their days back in Boston when they used to order Chinese takeout. Now I’m in the mood for some Chinese takeout, maybe to eat while watching THE FIRM again.

The sense of class and quality that Sydney Pollack generally brought to his films feels like a lost art now, even when they don’t come together. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of all of them and maybe I shouldn’t discuss my true feelings about Best Picture winner OUT OF AFRICA, not to mention HAVANA. But even in cases like these, there’s a feeling of pure craft to his body of work and a sense of careful consideration brought to the material that’s undeniable. No one trying to make an equivalent of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR these days is doing it as well as he did. THE FIRM definitely isn’t THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but it is an enjoyable popcorn movie with just enough depth to give the drama some teeth. With his films, no matter what the ostensible plot is, the director almost always seemed most interested in the relationship between the man and the woman at the heart of it all, as if to say that if Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in CONDOR weren’t going to connect to each other then there was no reason to ever care about the CIA coverup of oil shortages, that if Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange weren’t going to walk off arm in arm at the end of TOOTSIE then that entire scheme for dressing up as a woman wasn’t going to mean anything. Through each of these films he was always more interested in the people than the plot, that’s the sort of conflict he excelled in exploring. While THE FIRM always knows that it’s the thriller element which everyone is interested in, Pollack uses the love story between the two leads as a sort of north star to always circle back to and locate an emotional center. It may be something that sets the film apart from the source material but the basic idea behind that does give it a needed emotional heft. That sort of human connection is why Sydney Pollack was hired for these things, after all. And the film is still a well-crafted piece of work. Which, along with being a big box office hit, I guess you could say is all it was ever supposed to be.

Harvard Law student Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is at the top of his class and being recruited by all the top firms around the country but the one that really catches his eye with their offer is the smaller Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis. Convincing his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) that this is a place where they can make a life together, the two are soon moving to Memphis where they’re greeted by a new house and car plus long hours for Mitch as he studies for the bar exam under the tutelage of mentor Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) but Abby can’t shake this feeling that there’s something off about the whole setup, especially when a few associates of the firm are killed in a boat accident down in the Cayman Islands. Mitch is suspicious enough to hire a private detective who once served time in prison with his brother Ray (David Straihairn), who he keeps secret from his new employers, to investigate. But it all comes to a head when the FBI approaches Mitch with the truth about the firm, that it is a front for the biggest mob family in Chicago. Mitch tries to figure out what to do but when he is shown photo evidence of a tryst that he had with a beautiful woman down in the Cayman Islands as a threat he realizes that he and his wife’s lives are in danger so he soon begins to take action, devising a plan for the two of them to escape free and clear.

Is this the film that introduced the world to the concept of Tom Cruise Running? There’s probably some earlier photographic evidence, but I can’t think of a film where it seemed as crucial as it does here here, whether chasing after his wife Abby or racing away from the bad guys, a few sequences that feel like the key visual images of the film so maybe this is the birth of the defining image of Tom Cruise, Movie Star. And this feels appropriate since it’s the breakneck pace of THE FIRM that always comes to mind, a film which moves so fast that it feels like it was made by people who never got a chance to sit down. THE FIRM began shooting in November of ‘92 and wrapped in March before its release at the end of June, and even if that schedule didn’t inform the pace of the film, it still feels like it always wants to keep moving nonstop. That short schedule was part of the reason for the lengthy running time of 154 minutes and even with how much narrative ground the film is trying to cover summer movies in 1993 were almost never this long. At the time of release Sydney Pollack was even quoted as saying, “It’s like the old line, ‘I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time.’ If I had had another two months, I would have made a shorter picture.” Plot points go by quickly, dialogue is spoken at a rapid pace and it’s always racing forward to the next moment as if you’re going to miss something if you look away.

But it’s the director’s awareness of what each scene needs to be and how the story needs to keep the film moving that holds all this together even when it’s not always clear just why something is happening or who is being talked about. An underrated part of Sydney Pollack’s skill as a filmmaker was how he used the anamorphic frame, especially in something like THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR which is very likely even better than you remember, a film where every shot becomes something intricately connected to the whole and it all flows beautifully. He backed away from the widescreen style in the ‘80s to a standard 1.85 ratio which I always imagined had to do with getting annoyed at seeing something like TOOTSIE panned and scanned on TV. I still think a wider frame would have lent some extra cinematic juice to OUT OF AFRICA, not that it mattered with the Oscars, it would have helped HAVANA, it would have helped his remake of SABRINA. It was like if Sydney Pollack wasn’t shooting a film in Scope, that somehow robbed him of the key inspiration for how to stage each scene leading to a dullness to each shot so it all just becomes a version of bad television. It would also have helped THE FIRM but it doesn’t feel like this matters as much since the film always feels like it’s fighting against this, to keep things continually moving even when the scene is just a few characters sitting in an office. It’s a good-looking film photographed by John Seale, with even a few split diopter shots tossed in, but it’s never trying to be an elegant looking one, maybe because instead of trying for intricate composition it’s a case of using the frame to tell the story in the cleanest way possible. One of the best purely visual moments of the film is locked in with that suspense, which has hitman Tobin Bell running, again with the running, after the monorail where he has already spotted the unknowing Cruise during the Mud Island sequence (out of curiosity, I looked the location up to find out that this monorail hasn’t actually operated since 2018 and likely won’t again which is too bad for anyone looking to take THE FIRM tours in Memphis), a nicely done beat of suspense that becomes not only about the chase but about the location being utilized as well.

For that plot which never wants to rest, (screenplay credited to David Rabe and Robert Towne & David Rayfiel, based on the novel by John Grisham) the film takes what might have been pages of droning on about tax law which it turns into dialogue that it manages to make colorful and to the point, as if what’s needed is to find just the right amount of crackle to keep the scenes engaging. The film clearly knows that it’s really about Mitch and Abby from the start when the first thing he talks about in his interview with the firm is his wife and the plotting is canny even in small ways like how it delays Gene Hackman’s entrance later than you’d expect so he’s not first seen as just one more face in a crowd of lawyers. Since all this moves so fast it feels like a valid question just how much sense the plot actually makes but it sure seems active enough to make us think it does. Forgetting the novel, which I read decades ago and I’m not reading again now, I’m not sure why a law firm inexorably tied to the mafia would need to go to the extra trouble of overbilling clients as well but, of course, I’m not a lawyer so I’m not the person to answer this question but it’s clear that the reason it’s there is to give the main character a way out when he needs to think of one. When asked about why he became a lawyer in the first place, Mitch McDeere talks about being afraid of what the government can do to anyone so along with what the mob can do makes this film that much more about one man looking out for himself and his wife which is a theme but not one the film spends much time on.

The book ends with the main character blowing up everything he’s been running from and fleeing with the money, holding onto a few key secrets but leaving his life behind. The movie, looking for relatability to characters who are put in impossible situations, is about regaining his life of normalcy and finding “a way through” as opposed to a way out as he puts it, regaining the trust that was lost in the marriage and by following the letter of the law which is the greater victory. Does this change the book? Yes. Do I care? Not really. This isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald, after all. It’s not even Tom Wolfe. At the end Mitch McDeere declares that all this got him to think about the law again, which sounds good for a completion to his character arc but there was never much evidence that it was something he forgot about during all that studying for the bar exam anyway. The real goal of the film is finding a way for the two main characters to rediscover how much they mean to each other so the piano that is prominent in the David Grusin score can reach its crescendo and we know they’re going to be ok.

But the film remains enjoyable, as well as rewatchable, partly due to the pace, partly due to the colorful dialogue and how it moves the plot forward in ways that are both active and suspenseful, even as it rushes through plot points that come from the book it can’t dispense with, the way Gary Busey is eliminated almost immediately after he’s been introduced. The Memphis flavor of the setting feels a little obligatory but it’s there, with the location filming, the tangent about Holly Hunter’s ex-husband Elvis and all those ribs being barbecued at the welcome party. A few points when Mitch admits certain things to certain people before you’d expect him to give the impression of stuff happening but also feel like they’re trying to keep a character being played by Tom Cruise proactive through all the plot machinations as much as anything. He also does a series of somersaults with a kid on a colorful Memphis street and no one seems to think this is at all strange but of course it’s obviously there to set up his skill at being able to escape when he’s on the run later on, so presumably he spent time in gymnastics in addition to pre-law, not that it ever feels like it mattered. Either way, the film moves so fast that even at this early stage there’s barely a second to even think about it. Even the sense of weather that goes all through the film, the feel of passing seasons add just the right texture to each of these settings so whether it’s the fall leaves in Memphis, the snow in DC or the lush nights in the Cayman Islands it all works.

Sydney Pollack also finds ways to give each of these actors their own moments so they stand out, the way Gene Hackman gets one of the best speeches in the film about tax law which he practically just spits out without effort, which doesn’t really have much to do with anything but it does make us think that serious matters are being discussed. Even when they just get a few minutes the actors have a chance to make an impression, like Holly Hunter’s terror when she seeks Mitch out, the way Hal Holbrook isn’t playing the head of the firm as a bad guy at all, the bluster of Ed Harris threatening Mitch but especially the amazing scene of Wilford Brimley’s firm security chief playing against type to let his folksy demeanor become instantly terrifying as he lays down the law for Mitch, showing him the photos taken when he made love to the girl on the beach, using the phrase “kind of intimate acts, oral and whatnot” to describe their activities which alone probably justifies the film’s entire existence. There’s still the sense that all this barely holds together. What is the time frame of the movie once Mitch and Abby move to Memphis? Months? Weeks? This doesn’t really matter either.

There’s the feeling that the people making this movie were so infused with the idea of bringing quality to what is basically an airplane potboiler that you imagine them spending a few days trying to decide if there was a way to get around the hero cheating on his wife only to finally decide the plot depends on that. In the book Mitch never tells Abby about the woman on the beach, played enticingly by Karina Lombard, but in the film about bringing the two of them together it feels necessary. The rush to get the film done in time for the summer release makes it feel like some of the pacing didn’t quite get perfected, the way some scenes feel like they’re cut away from before actually finishing so actual human interaction gets lost at times. For one thing, after so much time spent on whatever is going on between Abby and Avery Tolar, it feels like there needs to be a final moment with Gene Hackman when he’s last seen but the film doesn’t pause for that beat. That piano-heavy score by David Grusin probably seems even more eccentric now than it did at the time but it adds immeasurably to both the pace and the mood of the film, giving the film its own personality with the main love theme almost making you think that this could have been in a ‘70s Sydney Pollack film as well as keeping the mood of conspiracy in the air. It’s all a reminder that in 1993 it was still possible to for a film like this to have a score that had some actual personality to it, thanks to all that piano along with one suspense track clearly modeled after the John Williams “The Conspirators” cue from JFK which was all the rage in any sort of action/thriller during that decade.

That music is a key part of the last hour’s excitement with all that running around and when Tom Cruise finally hits Wilford Brimley repeatedly with his briefcase (well, there’s a symbol) it’s hard not to wish he’d do it a few more times. Tom Cruise also plays the big scene with Paul Sorvino that follows as if he’s exhausted from all that running but can still hold the scene together so what he says seems to make sense. Maybe I still have some questions, but the film seems confident that all this will work out. The way the film comes back to the two leads at the very end makes it clear that it was always about a guy who wanted money and the life that comes with it but then has to realize none of that matters if he doesn’t have the woman he loves, which isn’t anything particularly revolutionary but it gets the job done. The final lines between Cruise and Tripplehorn do feel a little like of one of the esteemed writers working on this, whether Towne or Rayfiel, pulled it from a file of unused romantic dialogue that they always liked but it turns the moment into a relatable scene of connection for two people who came close to losing each other and realized how much they didn’t want to. It keeps that sense of class and respectability going until the credits roll. THE FIRM is a thriller with less substance than it maybe wants to admit but it becomes a movie about a man who rediscovers the two things that matters the most to him, his wife and the law, taking his life back and becoming a person again instead of the yuppie asshole that the world wanted him to be. It feels like the right ending and a reminder that THE FIRM isn’t close to being the best movie that Sydney Pollack ever made but, looking at it again right now at this point in time, it does feel like a movie.

It’s also a Tom Cruise movie and his performance becomes all about his eagerness to achieve this life with his naivete front and center until he realizes that he’s in over his head which of course turns into that very Tom Cruise-like determination to overcome all this. If the film can’t take a breath, then he can’t either, convincingly charging through all that rapid-fire dialogue as fast as possible that always holds the focus of the film together. In the case of Gene Hackman, at the time of release the thing that was talked about was that his name didn’t appear on the poster since Cruise was the only one who could be above the title; he does get above the title billing on the actual film. Looking at it again now it feels like this has been hiding in plain sight as one of his most underrated performances with the way he brings a confidence and looseness to the character in order to find the humanity in this material that no one else is looking for, cutting deep to find the real emotional damage within that he would never admit. When Hackman says, “That’s even better than getting even with him,” it’s the best moment in the film. Jeanne Tripplehorn, the one he’s talking to there, brings just enough of an edge to what is of course basically the wife role on paper and the way she grounds each of her scenes gives it the relatability it needs, playing it so you believe she makes that trip to the Cayman Islands. She’s also the one with the lines that matter near the end and because of her the moment works.

It always felt like each John Grisham adaptation was cast like a disaster movie filled with recognizable faces and this is one of the best including Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Wilford Brimley, Tobin Bell, Jerry Weintraub, Karina Lombard on the beach, the uncredited Paul Sorvino and probably somebody else I’m forgetting. LAW & ORDER star Steven Hill, one of the leads of Sydney Pollack’s first feature as director THE SLENDER THREAD in 1965 and very well-cast here as someone who doesn’t seem intimidated by Tom Cruise in the slightest, appears as FBI Director Denton Voyles and this was his last film appearance. The voice of Sydney Pollack himself is heard briefly on a phone call, not exactly his performance on the phone as Faye Dunaway’s boyfriend in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but it was a nice surprise to discover this recently.

THE FIRM was a summer movie featuring adults which, believe it or not, still wasn’t an entirely strange thing at the time it was released, so don’t tell me we haven’t been going backwards. It wasn’t even a prestige film going for Oscars so the two nominations it got were Supporting Actress for Holly Hunter and David Grusin’s score. If he hadn’t just won the previous year for UNFORGIVEN, it’s not a stretch to imagine Gene Hackman getting in there as well. And I keep thinking of this as a summer movie, a summer movie that I wish still existed, the sort where two people see it in an air-conditioned theater, enjoy themselves, then go off to have dinner where not much time is even spent talking about the movie. Of course, movies like this can be made but it doesn’t mean they’re going to which, if you ask me, is a problem even if Sydney Pollack sadly isn’t around anymore to make them. Feeling more like a popcorn movie than anything else he made in his career, Sydney Pollack knew not to make The FIRM more than it is, but he did bring it just enough class and intelligence to make it more than it might have been, the sort of film that once regularly got made and now no longer is. It’s still nice to remember that it happened.