Leave the World Behind, the latest, disappointingly under-the-radar directorial effort of Mr. Robot and Homecoming mastermind Sam Esmail, premieres on Netflix on Dec. 8. It features a catalog of famous faces, Julia Roberts perhaps the most noteworthy among them. Not too long ago, Roberts was considered movie star royalty. Following the one-two punch of Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman, the actress’s star power was considerable enough that it inspired a running gag in Robert Altman’s 1992 industry satire The Player. Famously, that film’s opening sequence depicts a number of fake movie pitches, all of which name-drop Roberts as their potential lead. She even appears in the movie’s final moments, as the co-star of a fake legal thriller called Habeas Corpus. Roberts would star only one year later in The Pelican Brief, a deliberately paced and talky legal thriller that netted $195.3 million at the box office but has seldom been talked about since. Maybe it should be.
Directed by Alan J. Pakula, The Pelican Brief is a classic star vehicle, with the formidable double billing of Roberts and Denzel Washington, only a few years removed from his first Academy Award win for Glory (1989). It’s also one of a glut of John Grisham adaptations that hit Hollywood like a storm during the 1990s. Released only five months after Sydney Pollack’s The Firm, it was followed a year later by The Client, in 1996 by A Time to Kill and in 1997 by The Rainmaker. Impressively, almost all these movies have noteworthy directors, from Pollack to Francis Ford Coppola, even Joel Schumacher. Audiences were in an undeniable frenzy for Grisham’s particular brand of earnest, Clinton-era pragmatism, which put young and idealistic heroes at the forefront of wide-ranging legal and political conspiracies. His scrappy protagonists, often in over their heads, represented an escape from the frustrating realities of the American legal system, something Grisham himself dealt with as a small-town lawyer in the mid-‘80s. The widespread popularity of his work during Clinton’s presidency speaks, ever so problematically, to an audience eager to accept the idea of “truth” as the ultimate salve that could heal both sides of the ideological divide. Certainly, there was distrust in the government and its uneven power structures, but also a reliance on order to overcome it. It’s not the system that’s broken, just the people.
Scrutinized through a political lens, The Pelican Brief could easily fit this description, but something about it feels different. The story’s hero, a young law student named Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts), is out of her league from beginning to end. Her most valuable ally is Gray Grantham (Denzel Washington), a hard-hitting journalist for the Washington Herald who himself harbors a deep distrust of the system. The film doesn’t dig into this too much, but there’s a moment early on in which Grantham, dressed undercover in a hoodie and sweats, is tailing a lead and attempts to hail a taxicab to follow his source. The taxi speeds off as soon as he goes for the door, in an obvious act of racial bias. These characters exist within a system that is fundamentally unjust, in ways that extend far past the film’s immediate concerns. Even if the conspiracy can be solved, the corrupt politicians exposed for their deadly acts, there are still more insidious frameworks that remain unvanquished. Darby’s victory comes at the expense of her anonymity and with the risk that others will see her as a threat and seek retribution. In essence, she can never truly be safe. The film’s final 20 minutes are disappointingly pat, but they’re preceded by approximately 121 minutes of surprisingly intellectual thrills.
At a little over two-and-a-half hours, the film takes its time. While this pacing has been criticized by some, it’s arguably more of a feature than a flaw. The narrative kicks off when Supreme Court Justices Jensen (Ralph Cosham) and Rosenberg (Hume Cronyn) are murdered by an assassin, Khamel (Stanley Tucci), operating under the instruction of an anonymous but powerful client. Studying law at Tulane University, the whip-smart Darby writes a legal brief detailing her theory on the murders that she then shows to her professor and lover, Thomas Callahan (Sam Shepard), a former friend of Rosenberg’s. Callahan shows his student’s brief to his friend, Gavin Verheek (John Heard), special counsel to the director the FBI, and gradually, it climbs the ladder of command to the White House. Later, an inebriated Callahan is mysteriously killed by a car bomb. Darby narrowly avoids this fate, having refused to ride with him while drunk, but soon finds herself on the run from assassins. It’s not until she manages to contact Grantham, nearly an hour in, that she begins to turn the tables on her attackers, intent on unraveling the duplicitous conspiracy before it’s too late. Spoiler: It goes all the way to the top.
A delicious paranoia pervades every frame of The Pelican Brief. For those familiar with Pakula’s most notable work, this should hardly be a surprise. Pakula reached his creative and critical zenith with a trio of ‘70s political thrillers: Klute, The Parallax View, and the Oscar-nominated All the President’s Men. Collectively dubbed the “Paranoia Trilogy,” these works variously tackled themes of surveillance and hidden forces operating with sinister intent. Loss of control is a major thematic element throughout all three works, albeit in different, variously pessimistic or optimistic ways. Who can you trust? In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Pakula acolyte Esmail notes that, at the time, the director was reacting to “a lot of mistrust in systems, government, and corporations in society,” but that “… the same thing is happening right now … There’s a lot of mistrust of the world around us, [wondering], ‘are we being manipulated behind the scenes?’” If those issues persist now, then they certainly were present in 1993, and Pakula was exactly the right filmmaker to handle this type of material. Even with Grisham’s much more optimistic (and, it must be said, less interesting) approach to these troubling quandaries, the veteran director is still able to concoct sequences of hair-raising tension from Darby and Grantham’s noble race for the truth.
A few of these tense sequences are absolute knockouts. First, there’s a terrifically shot set piece involving Darby and the assassin Khamel in a public square, which makes excellent use of sound and crowd dynamics to create a palpable sense of helplessness. There’s also a brilliant bit involving repeated near-misses with a car bomb that’s been planted in Grantham’s car. The climactic sequence – set entirely in a parking garage, a Pakula favorite – is charmingly low-key. Sometimes, all you need is a couple of people hiding from a guy with a gun, all so they can get back to the newspaper offices in time to publish the article that will change everything. It’s easy to forget that the majority of The Pelican Brief is just two talented actors intensely whispering to each other in rooms, because whispering can be exciting too. Overlong but hardly one of Pakula’s weaker efforts, it’s a much stronger film that its muted reception would suggest. In the age of IP-driven blockbusters and endless, regurgitated corporate content, it’s the type of earnest and intelligent big-screen entertainment that, however flawed, remains sorely missed.
The post Criminally Underrated: The Pelican Brief appeared first on Spectrum Culture.