Tag: The Modern Review

“Disclosure,” directed by Barry Levinson

disclosure

By Ray Sawhill

“Disclosure,” from Michael Crichton’s potboiler, is a facsimile of an absorbing movie. It’s a humanoid with a heart of silicon that has been sheathed alluringly and made to perform some fluid dance steps. The crisis-in-the-workplace atmosphere is what’s most original about the movie. You’re drawn to notice the way a secretary avoids her boss’s eyes when she knows something she doesn’t want to tell him. You wonder what that group down by the elevator could have been meeting about at this time of day.

The director, Barry Levinson, has fitted the film out with an oil-rubbed, yuppie opulence — weathered wood and time-worn brick, lush Pacific Northwest greenery. Ennio Morricone’s score supplies a suave version of old-fashioned movie-music warmth and grandeur. “Disclosure” may be for audiences that ask only for something a little more movielike — bigger, more adult — than the TV they usually watch. But it’s a handsome, professional job.

Demi Moore is Meredith, a lustrous package of calves, thighs, greed and cleavage, wrapped in a power suit. Michael Douglas is Tom, a roll-up-your-sleeves family man. Both are employees of a Seattle computer firm. They had an affair back when Tom was single; now she gets the promotion he was hoping for, and she becomes his boss. She invites him to a meeting in her new office. “You’ve kept in good shape, Tom,” she says with throaty appreciation; then she comes on to him mercilessly. From there on out, it’s dueling accusations, and Tom’s struggle to keep his job and protect his family. No, not just that, but to establish the truth, goddammit.

We know Tom deserves his righteousness because we’re shown his kids, his matronly wife, and his iconic home: fireplace, cushions, warm lights, comforters. We know Meredith is evil because she works out on a Stairmaster, and because we never see her at home. All she has in her fridge, we’re told, is an orange and some champagne.

The company’s building (designed by Neil Spisak) is the film’s central showpiece and metaphor. It’s a matter of PC networks, black steel and leather, slipped into an arches-and-fluted-columns, renovated industrial space, with an atrium that’s like a small opera hall. It’s a stylish beehive, a pull-off-your-tie workplace. It’s also sliced up by panels of glass, and it’s unnervingly well-wired — i.e., watch your back. The audience murmurs when Tom starts receiving mysterious e-mails, and when, after a career of keeping his office open, he begins swinging his glass door shut.

Friends tell me they enjoy Crichton’s overcaffeinated-but-not-too-gonzo pacing, and the enthusiasm in the press for his current TV series, “ER,” has focused on its pace. “It’s an adrenaline rush of velocity, trauma, pathos and heroism,” wrote Rick Marin in Newsweek. “It’s like channel surfing without having to hit the remote.”

Information overload isn’t my idea of entertainment — I get enough of it at work — but I also have other problems with Crichton. He has zero sensuality and no descriptive powers. He has a way with pop hooks, but the novels seem to consist of nothing but research, coincidences, and downtime. In his novel “Congo,” the loopiest of the bunch (to be released in movie form this summer), he piles on the jaw-droppers — he subjects his jungle-explorer heroes to a political revolution, cannibals, killer gorillas, angry hippos, and a volcano that’s ready to blow. It’s a high-tech “Tarzan,” minus campiness and sexiness.

A mixture of technocrat and Dr. Frankenstein, Crichton projects the mechanical onto the organic; he’s fascinated by people hooked up to life-support systems. Where does the person end and the machine begin, and vice versa? If he has a theme, that’s it. The central image of his work is an ID card being run through a slot, and providing ingress to a fancy lab.

I’ve sped through a number of his books, but the only two I’ve sped through happily are the most recent, “Rising Sun” and “Disclosure.” In them he’s gone from futuristic cautionary claptrap to torn-from-the-headlines cautionary claptrap, and he’s become an angry man, an op-ed novelist. The topicality and fire give filmmakers something to contend with. The director of “Rising Sun,” Philip Kaufman, did a lot of script tweaking and creative casting, and made a film that was a hip, off-hand comedy about multiculturalism, as well as an essay about the dissolution of the movie image.

Barry Levinson works more broadly, and in square, showbusiness terms; his work has gone into making things smooth and acceptable. It’s a creamy example of contemporary Hollywood retrofitting. Levinson and his screenwriter, Paul Attanasio, have made the film more balanced than the book. In the novel, for instance, Tom’s wife is a feminist shrew who leaves town with the kids for the duration of the brouhaha; in the movie she sticks around to witness, suffer, and be loyal.

But, like Kaufman, Levinson is also writing an essay, in his case about what movies have become. It’s a joke about how work-obsessed the country is that, as for the homey but high-tech Seattle, all we get — aside from some cityscapes and a little time on the ferries — is a single sequence. The company’s CEO (Donald Sutherland) is driving Douglas to a hearing, and is trying to con him into a deal. We see the city reflected in the car’s windows.

Michael Douglas’ peevishness and flabby sarcasm don’t put off the audience. Moore’s lack of stature and tenacity don’t either. You could criticize the film by saying that no sparks fly between Douglas and Moore, even in their operatic near-coitus scene, but Douglas doesn’t lose face playing the anguished virgin. A man who waits until after the cock-sucking and panty-ripping to pull himself away from a woman should be a joke, and some members of the audience do giggle. But they don’t give up on the film. Moore and Douglas have been in hits and on the covers of magazines, thus they’re stars, and thus they have sex appeal.

Levinson seems aware that Douglas and Moore are simulacra. (Most of the rest of the cast is loose and funny.) They’re what we build films around today, he’s saying, as we build films around Crichton’s flow-chart plots. The filmmaker’s role is to customize these elements to the audience’s preference, to dress the robot. (In fact, you read Moore’s character by her clothes: is it charcoal miniskirts and stiletto heels today, or a severe pantsuit?) Levinson is half going along with this, and half taking note of it.

It’s heartening that almost no one in the press has gotten worked up about the reversal on the usual sex-harassment pattern. No one except The New York Times’ Caryn (Dial-a-Theme-Piece) James, that is. She argues that the film unconsciously expresses men’s fear of powerful women, and she includes the inevitable reference to Anita Hill. Her editors obligingly ran a photo of Hill taking the oath.

It’s one of the funnier assumptions many writers on pop culture make, that a (for instance) committee-created artifact costing tens of millions of dollars is likely to express much of anything unconsciously. The fact is that no one leaves the theater after “Disclosure” discussing, or arguing about, sexual harassment. (What they talk about is how sweaty the “C’mon, let’s do it!” “No, I mustn’t!” scene is.) Women in the audience have no trouble hissing Meredith, Demi Moore’s character. You’d think Caryn James would be happy that it’s now OK for a woman to be the powerful villain. But then, Caryn James — quick to use feminist ideology as a substitute for thinking and responding — is the Meredith of film reviewers.

When, in earlier movies, the hero entered deeper realms — entrails — in search of truth, he usually found himself in caves, basements, abandoned factories, a sewer system. Here, he enters a virtual-reality database. The populist feelings the movie targets concern jobs, computers and bosses — especially anger at the way jobs are taking up more of our lives, yet are becoming more unstable. The film’s glamour and suspense have to do with our sense that we’re sacrificing our time and our personalities to the exciting, mysterious microchip god.

Like “Fatal Attraction,” “Disclosure” does one of those things pop movies are supposed to do, but do rarely, which is give us something recognizable that we don’t get from more serious work. In “Fatal Attraction,” it was the archetype of the dangerously-crazy, 45ish, unattached career woman. In “Disclosure,” it’s a sense of the way the boundaries between our personal lives and our jobs are eroding, and how much we resent that. The film’s limitation is that Tom, the hands-on guy we identify with, is involved in making computers, and there’s no irony about his complicity in making machines that will distance us from direct experience yet one more step.

Meredith, alluring and ruthless, yet empty, is one of those automatons Crichton finds sexy yet warns us against. If Crichton were an artist rather than a moralist-entertainer, he’d admit that Meredith isn’t just his enemy — she’s also his muse.

©1994 by Ray Sawhill First appeared in The Modern Review.

“Death Becomes Her,” directed by Robert Zemeckis

death becomes her

By Ray Sawhill

Meryl Streep’s performance in Robert Zemeckis’ new movie “Death Becomes Her” doesn’t wipe out memories of the hours of classy boredom she’s inflicted — instead, it makes amusing use of them. As a dragon-lady star of stage and screen, Streep scrawls nasty things on “Meryl Streep,” the A-student. (In all fairness, it must be admitted that for several pictures — “She-Devil,” “Postcards from the Edge,” “Defending Your Life” — she has been trying to subvert her image.) An immaculate performer, she doesn’t have the messiness or the subterranean qualities that true popular stars have. Here, her performance is like a Mad magazine parody of a Streep performance, only she’s giving it herself — and she has edge and dirt. You can finally see what people who saw her on stage have always said they saw — a sense of fun. She may be constitutionally incapable of cutting loose; even her yowls and hisses are impeccably modulated. But her control is part of the joke, and she seems wise to it.

“Death Becomes Her” is a striking horror comedy about glamour and the desire for eternal youth — an enjoyably malicious Hollywood act of self-desecration. Streep is the aging star; Goldie Hawn is the dormouse best friend, whose fiancés Streep keeps stealing. They play female drag queens, scrapping to the death over a guy who isn’t worth it (and who knows he isn’t worth it) — a plastic surgeon played by Bruce Willis. Isabella Rossellini, in a low-slung sarong and Salomé necklaces, is a siren with an elixir that defies time and aging. Her presence, with its echoes of cosmetic ads and of her mother, kicks the movie into fantasyland.

The screenwriters, David Koepp and Martin Donovan, have described their script as “Night of the Living Dead as Noel Coward would have done it” — it’s pure camp ghoulishness and bitchiness. Robert Zemeckis’ direction is all boyish exuberance and technological hi-jinks. Zemeckis, who is known for his mock-heroic, Moebius-strip action comedies such as “Used Cars” and the “Back to the Future” series, goes for debonair comic poise. But the film still has its rambunctiousness — it’s like an Ealing comedy as the young Steven Spielberg might have directed it.

As a failure who’s out of his league, half-boozed and skidding around corners, Willis doesn’t just play against type. He creates a convincingly small man with ordinary failings and wholesome goals; he’d like to live out a Capra film but he’s caught up in a Puccini opera. Goldie’s a joy in her scenes with Meryl when they’ve made up after their feuds — they’re girls together again, finishing each other’s sentences. And when Goldie’s weight balloons in misery — itself a joke on the actress’s obvious fanaticism about her figure — she seems inspired. If she’s not as successful in her other scenes, this isn’t just because her own features have clearly gotten some surgical tune-ups but because she hasn’t figured out a Phyllis Diller-like way of acknowledging and enjoying the improvement. On some level she’s still hoping we won’t notice.

Zemeckis plays with elements straight out of horror films: turrets, mirrors, shadows, fireplaces, arches, thunder and lightning. It’s “Kane” and it’s “Frankenstein,” with the iconography used not for depth and resonance (however pseudo), but cartoonishly. (And the special effects are used for L.A.-gothic shivers.) Zemeckis, the misanthropic puppet-master — the filmmaker as mad-scientist/cartoonist — is too cold-hearted to achieve beauty, but he gives the film a spooky, layered, visual splendiferousness. He wraps the action in oversized marble staircases and columns that are a parody of Hollywood postmodern/baronial luxe. They’re meant to contrast with the characters’ pettiness and narcissism. This epic décor is a joke about how the glamour factory is also a horror factory where people try to turn themselves into monuments to themselves. The composer Alan Silvestri partners Zemeckis, heightening the already-overdone Hollywood thing and making it even more absurdly grand.

Zemeckis has the soul of a mid-American media-junkie kid. He’s frankly in love with speed and cheapness, over-the-top-ness, camera hysteria, genre clichés — with the vulgarity of film, and with the ways movies can overstimulate us. His style expresses the uncontrollable enthusiasm of a small boy turned on by the huge movie image and engulfing music.

But the film’s combination of wit and physicality unnerves some people, as though you ought to be allowed only one or the other. These people find Zemeckis’ perversity and excitement an assault; they want to be asked to care for the characters on screen. Zemeckis never asks you to believe in what he’s showing you; in his films, human values exist only to be mocked.

Zemeckis excites us, then needles our responsiveness to the movie image — not for an art effect, but strictly for our entertainment. He’s a companionable sadist. Like Joe Dante and Brian De Palma, Zemeckis can seem crude, dumb and childish to Europeans, and to people who cling to European-style notions about art and seriousness. He’s the opposite of an art movie-maker; the tradition he’s working in is of overbright commercial entertainment. Yet in “Used Cars” and “Death Becomes Her,” he provokes some of the same responses Buñuel sometimes did. (It’s another sign of how well-digested “revolutionary” as an aesthetic criterion has become that people who have learned to appreciate surrealism and to talk with approval of its revolutionary intent get riled by “Death Becomes Her.”)

Zemeckis gives viewers no moral vision to hang onto; putting over his cartoon effects is his only morality. Streep’s noggin gets bopped and her neck breaks and hinges over backwards, leaving her head hanging upside down between her shoulder blades. Goldie Hawn rises from being shot, angry as hell and with a hole a foot wide in her gut. It’s cheerfully gruesome and macabre — pop Buñuel.

“Death Becomes Her” is such a rowdy hunk of polished malevolence that it made American media people fret and freak when it was released this summer. It’s a kick watching the hypersensitivities erupt — adults grow touchy about the things they threw darts at as kids. Variety’s scorecard of critics’ reactions showed 14 negative and only five positive reviews. David Denby proclaimed from on high, or least in New York magazine, that it was all he could do to refrain from calling the film the worst big-budget movie he’d ever seen: “anxiety, loathing and self-hatred gush from its pores,” he thundered. (When evil needs crushing Denby’s your man.) Even the people who devised the publicity campaign felt it necessary for the ads to spell out that the film is a black comedy.

Perhaps just raising the topic of women and aging is enough to put some people in the mood not to laugh, and to make them find a film cruel to its women characters. It’s probably no use pointing out that the film is cruel to everyone, and that’s the fun — pleasure in amoral vindictiveness is not the kind of fun these people want from a movie. Of course Zemeckis sees his women as monsters. But he’s also tickled by their overblown crass vitality and their cut-throat determination to have things their way. The plastic surgeon, who wants to live out a normal lifespan and redeem himself with humane works, is cackled at. He’s a sucker, a softie who wants to do good — he’s like the people in the audience who are horrified by the film.

Zemeckis apparently lacks the desire to do anything elevated in tone. (He’s an anti-do-gooder.) But it may be that his mean-spiritedness is what gives him staying power and keeps his work enjoyable. He has made a few films some of us have regarded as duds (“Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “Back to the Future II”); he has asked us to care about his characters a few times (“Romancing the Stone,” “Back to the Future”); and this film has some glitches of logic. But throughout the whole of his career (it began in 1978 with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”), he has never once romanticized his feelings, not even his feelings about movies.

Cheerfully lowbrow, Zemeckis’ pictures can be wonderfully complicated and suggestive. “Death Becomes Her” may get you thinking about how the overlapping themes of time-travel and of bringing the dead back to life are among the most potent themes of pop movies. And, like all his films, it’s full of screens, reflections, frames and projections. You could set a team of grad students to work on such topics as “Zemeckis’ use of blue-screen effects,” or “the foreground/background joke,” or “contraptions, toys and models as metaphors for the filmmaking process,” or “old movie cannibalization and the new movie image,” and keep them busy for years. But Zemeckis doesn’t get poetic; he gets the giggles. His hall of mirrors is located at the suburban multiplex.

©1992 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“The Specialist,” directed by Luis Llosa

specialist

By Ray Sawhill

“The Specialist” is moronic and inept, and it put me in a very good mood. It’s an attempt at marrying a woman’s romance to an action-adventure plot. Sylvester Stallone is a bomb expert with something awful in his past. He’s in Miami, living the embittered former-soldier-of-fortune lifestyle — i.e., bunking down in an abandoned warehouse, practicing martial arts, playing intently with lethal gizmos that beep and make the camera cut to anxious close-ups. Sharon Stone is an enchantress who talks him into a risky job. Her parents were murdered when she was but a girl, and she wants Stallone to blow away the Latino gangster family responsible. Rod Steiger, really working that accent, is the ancient Latino patriarch, Eric Roberts the dumb stud son. The question is: can Sly and Sharon get over clinging to their pain and learn to trust each other?

The film has a luxury-resort quasi-glamour; it seems to have been made on sets that didn’t make the cut for De Palma’s “Scarface.” The visual scheme is tropicalismo: candy pink and neon blue, cabanas and palm trees. The script, by Alexandra Seros, shows a woman’s touch, if not perhaps to its best advantage. Stone to Stallone: “So that’s it? We just walk away? Forever?”

The director, Luis Llosa, may be bereft of filmmaking skills, but that doesn’t stop him from seeing everything in legendary terms. Steiger is unspeakably powerful; James Woods, playing Steiger’s Mr. Fixit and Stallone’s nemesis, unutterably unprincipled; Stallone indescribably masterful; Stone unthinkably beautiful. The bad guys smoke cigars to show how corrupt they are. John Barry contributes an appropriately excitable score. During one scene, the triumphal-yet-ominous horns and strings call up images in the mind of mounted lawmen arriving in town for the final showdown. What’s actually on-screen is Stallone carrying a bag of groceries.

Although watching Stallone struggle with his feelings is like watching cement being mixed, he’s surrounded by world-class hams. Eric Roberts is a sleek, spoiled viper. Woods wears domineering, double-breasted sports jackets, and throws a couple of fits as mean and funny as anything in “Pulp Fiction.” Both are as meek tyros beside Steiger, who chews scenery for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and stays hungry. In one scene, he pushes his face up to the camera and literally snorts like a bull. Woods, for maybe the first time ever on camera, looks a little intimidated.

In a swanky party scene, Stone makes a swivel-hipped, babe-on-a-catwalk entrance; she’s a stunning camera subject. She can act, too, and her tiny-featured, airline-stewardess prettiness makes her commitment to emotionality all the more vivid. Pursuing Roberts in order to watch him die, she allows herself to be caressed and made love to by a man she wants to kill. She does the arousal-crossed-with-revulsion touchingly well. In a daytime scene with Roberts at a bar, she’s wearing flowing cream slacks and a mostly-open cream tunic; her hair and makeup are more subdued than usual. Everything about her is taking in light and returning a soft glow except her narrowed eyes, which glitter. She looks well-fucked, financially taken-care-of, and venomous. (The guys behind me said “Damnnnn!” and “Sheeee-it!” admiringly.)

Is there another actress who compares to Stone as an incarnation of what America — alluring, narcissistic, deceitful, troubled — means to immigrants, and would-be immigrants? She’s the blonde who heroes in chop-socky movies sometimes won, and sometimes had to renounce. Many of the working-class people and recent immigrants I saw “The Specialist” with brought their kids and infants along to enjoy the bombings, beatings and nudity. We were all pretty cheerful afterwards. It’s a film that doesn’t make you feel sour about getting exactly what you paid for.

©1994 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“The Age of Innocence,” directed by Martin Scorsese

age_of_innocence01

Loose Talk

By Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill

Ray Sawhill: Most people probably take “The Age of Innocence” as a more-visually-inventive-than-usual Merchant-Ivory film. And most of them seem to enjoy it as such.

Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill: Middlebrow alert!

Polly Frost: It’s set in upper-crust 19th century New York City, among old money but just as the robber barons are emerging. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer. He has a private income, he dabbles in the law, he’s a member of one of the respectable families, and he’s engaged to the flawless, brainless offspring of another “good” family (Winona Ryder). But he has a hankering for culture. He caresses his books, and he knows one or two painters.

RS: Into his world walks Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess Olenska, woman of mystery and scandal. She’s fleeing a marriage to a philandering Polish count. She’s exotic, a teeny bit bohemian. Newland falls for her bigtime. So: will the countess, who needs money, return to the count or not? And what will Newland do about his passion for her?

PF: He’s such an honor-bound square that the way he expresses his passion for her is by helping her. There’s nothing more irritating than a man who gives you a lecture rather than making a pass at you. I’ve known a few of those.

RS: It’s a film in the tradition of “Brief Encounter.” And the missed-opportunity tragi-comedy is not my favorite genre. What do you make of the fact that some people have an appetite for genteel entertainments on this theme?

PF: They make a viewer feel civilized. They’re soap operas with all the good parts taken out.

RS: Newland Archer is a rotten central character. He’s a prig. You never understand why the countess looks at him passionately. Another problem is that Scorsese externalizes everything. Crimson, gold and chandeliers are everywhere. Since it’s already a Visconti world, the Countess doesn’t stand out. The film winds up being narrated and illustrated rather than dramatized.

PF: Some of the actors in the minor roles do seem to exist fully in the world of codified behavior and language. And Winona Ryder has a puppy-like helplessness, even when she’s being lethal and enslaving, that’s very effective.

RS: But Day-Lewis can’t do much with his role but mourn the way his balls are shriveling up. He’s so meticulous about playing a yearning American that he seems super-British. Pfeiffer works hard to generate some Garbo-like luster, but her nerves and her voice seem pure California.

PF: I liked her better than you did. She’s trying to come up with a reason why the countess is attracted to Newland. Maybe her interpretation is: the countess is out of her mind. She’s having a nervous breakdown.

RS: There’s another problem, which is the material itself. Over to you, honey.

PF: It’s a shallow and arch book, and it scores too easily off its characters. It exists mainly in its narration. Although when Wharton lets the two women really play with Newland, the book almost becomes malicious fun.

RS: I hate the snug, mocking social commentary about what “old New York” was like.

PF: And I hated Joanne Woodward’s reading of the narration. She had the tone of voice of someone who isn’t fun to gossip with. Julia Child would have been a better choice for the narrator.

RS: Scorsese makes old New York look like Vatican City, and his idea of psychology seems to be that WASPs are repressed Italians. What do you think he’s up to?

PF: He sets up an intricate perceiver/perceived thing, with binoculars and theater and paintings on the walls. What he does with it — and with the unbroken camera moves, and the dissolves, and the splintery editing — is try to show how your identity is formed by the tribe you’re in. And how people try to outwit it and like to think they can exist outside it, but are always getting trapped. It’s a web. The problem is that Scorsese thinks in purely cinematic terms. He knows what it is to be formed by movies and the media, but he doesn’t seem able to imagine his way inside someone who wasn’t formed by the media and the movies. Renoir and Ophuls used circling techniques to show characters caught up in a web, but they were so worldly you don’t feel it’s anything but cinematic technique.

RS: Scorsese really believes, or believed, that cinema is the apotheosis of the arts. He was one of those kids who was all revolutionary fervor. And his generation’s revolution has just led to corporate take-overs.

PF: It’s a generation that’s stuck with nostalgia. But I know you’re on a roll.

RS: Thanks. The generation before them — of Altman and Peckinpah — mastered traditional craft before they blew it apart. Scorsese’s generation bypassed traditional craft and headed for personal values. Now Scorsese’s left turning everything he touches into “personal cinema,” which in this case means he’s taken on Edith Wharton and produced a dignified variation of “Mean Streets” and “GoodFellas.” He makes the same movie over and move, no matter what the subject. The characters have no free will. There’s only Scorsese’s vision.

PF: In a scene set in the opera house balcony during intermission, the camera and the audio iris in on Newland and the countess, and she talks about the yellow roses he once sent her anonymously. He’s entranced: how does she know he sent them? She finishes talking to him, and she’s backlit for a minute by the stage lights as the curtain rises for the second act — she’s what connects him to the world of grand emotions, and to the arts. Art is viewed as transcendence, as it was in “Raging Bull.” But in “Raging Bull,” Jake LaMotta hurls himself directly at transcendence. Here, Newland holds back.

RS: Newland is like a virgin playing hard-to-get without even knowing it.

PF: I’ve known a few of those too.

© 1993 by Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill. First appeared in
The Modern Review.

 

“The Client” by John Grisham

grisham

By Ray Sawhill

Reading the bestselling novels of the young ex-lawyer John Grisham is like being privy to the conversations ambitious middle-Americans have with themselves. I’ve never read any fiction, including porn, romance novels and comic books, that’s so completely unself-aware, and I’ve never read a writer who’s less aware of his effects. He’s the Dan Quayle of novelists. His books are strangers to such concerns as shape, theme, character, and form; there’s nothing in them to wrestle with in the way of meaning.

It’s fiction for people who don’t normally read fiction by a guy who isn’t much drawn to it himself, except as a business proposition — as an effort to score a bonanza. But the books don’t seem to be experienced as cynical by his fans. (Is it because they too understand the world largely as a mass of business propositions?) His novels are for and of a world where making it is everything. Reading them is a little like watching game shows, except his novels are for people with college educations rather than working-class people. Grisham offers a little suspense, a little sexual temptation, and some money-and-job details to relate to.

The guy isn’t a genre craftsman, and the books aren’t exactly formula novels. At the same time, these suspense novels are an entertaining treasure trove of unwitting Dadaism. But where Dada was European and sophisticated, this is homegrown and inadvertent. The Dadaists were conscious artists purveying an idea of the unconscious. Grisham’s books are the unconscious. They don’t exactly express the ambivalent feelings many Americans have towards sophistication, but those feelings are certainly in them.

Grisham’s novels — he has written four so far and more than 19 million copies are in print — are full of scrambled syntax and crazy names, but there’s nothing of the puzzle-maker about him as a writer, and there’s nothing in the books that’s meant to be broken down or analyzed. Relationships dart in and out of the narrative frame in a way that, without meaning to, recalls Queneau. “Klickman was a meathead with little finesse,” the narrator of Grisham’s new novel “The Client” (Doubleday) tells us. Two pages later, the main character, an 11-year-old boy, apparently struck by what a great word choice the narrator made, begins a lecture to Klickman (a cop) this way: “Let me tell you something, meathead.” Within another couple of pages, the narrator, evidently pleased the 11-year-old enjoyed the word “meathead,” takes to calling the cop “Meathead Klickman.”

Listen to the Grisham narrator:

  • “Mo had at least four guns either on him or within reach.”
  • “He paced around the office as if in deep thought.”
  • “His screaming lungs were almost audible.”
  • “At some point, about halfway to the jet, Mark stopped.”

Sentences like these can really get you thinking: If the narrator doesn’t know, who does?

The idioms the narrator uses often seem to come from Mars. One character “cracks his window so he could breathe.” Another “cuts his eyes in all directions.” A singer in a black church opens her “vast mouth” and out flows “a deep, rich, mellow river of glorious a capella.”

At times you find yourself wondering if Grisham is trying to compete with Lewis Carroll:

“The name’s Reggie, okay.”

“Sure, Reggie. Listen, K.O. just brought me up to date.”

Even allowing for some attempts at comic characterization and for how eccentric names can be in the south, Grisham has the most topsy-turvy ear for character names imaginable. Nearly all are like something S.J. Perelman invented for a Marx Brothers movie: Cat Bruster, L. Winston Lotterhouse, Gavin Verheek, Gray Grantham, Fletcher Coal, Denton Voyles, Eric East, Clint Van Hooser, Smith Keen, Hinky Myrick, Mason Paypur, Willis Upchurch, Paul Gronke, Emmitt Waycross, Norma Thrash, Link Dole, Dr. Wilbert Rodeheaver.

In “The Client,” Grisham outdoes even himself in the name department, showing a completely inexplicable fondness for names with repeating letters: Boyd Boyette, Roy Foltrigg, Reggie Love, Penny Patoula, Chester Tanfill, Walter Deeble, Slick (Mole) Moeller, Marcia Riggle, Omar Noose. In a virtuoso touch, a few characters win names with double sets of double letters: Wally Boxx, Barry Muldanno, Skipper Scherff.

When a couple of thugs hole up at a Radisson Hotel, it certainly seems like the right place for them. And when you learn that the lead character adores pizza, you’re relieved — it’s the right food for him. If you look for a Nabokovian pattern of linguistic playfulness here, you won’t find one. You end up wondering: is this a tick that comes from Grisham’s years in Mississippi and Tennessee? The names contribute to sentences that really leave you cross-eyed: “He had an escort of sorts with Wally and Fink and agents Trumann and Scherff.”

When Grisham sets out to provide detail and atmosphere, what he achieves goes past the Hemingwayesque into pure corporate-speak. “The lights were bright and the carpet was clean.” “A minister of some generic faith appeared.” “His voice was loud, yet warm. His words were educated, yet colloquial.” “Deacons danced. Elders chanted. Women fainted.”

Reading his novels all at once, you turn up gems for the auteurists. Why, in three of the four novels, is there a black character — always a different one — whose first name is Roosevelt? In “The Client,” as in his other books, Grisham seems drawn to backsides: “Slow on his ass”; “He shifted his wide ass”; “Wally perched his tiny butt”; “He followed her, watching her wide rear end” — all these appear, in the narrator’s voice, within twenty pages of each other. In the first two pages of one chapter we get: “the screaming and ass-chewing had ended hours ago. He’d have the pleasure of busting her ass.”

Grisham’s storytelling is so methodical his novels sometimes have the minimalist fascination of those repetitious passages in Beckett where a character moves stones from one pocket to another. At these moments, the books seem more akin to office supply catalogues than to traditional fiction.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that the main character has gotten younger in each of the books. In “A Time to Kill,” he’s a lawyer in his early thirties; in “The Firm” he’s a new hiree; in “The Pelican Brief” it’s a woman law student. In “The Client” it’s the 11-year-old boy. Is there anything to make of this? Grisham’s scrambled narrative voice — a potpourri of steals from movies and TV shows, premature wise-guy cynicism and self-pity — and the main characters do synch up a little better in “The Client” than in the earlier books.

But it’s almost impossible to understand what the central plot of the novel is. The setup is clear: a mob lawyer is trying to commit suicide. The boy tries to foil him. Drunk and morose, the mob guy tells the kid where a dead senator’s body has been buried, then manages to do himself in. But the rest of the book! The only thing that keeps it from shutting down entirely is that the boy can’t decide whether or not to tell anyone his secret.

That said, it’s easy to understand why, when you board a plane and walk to your seat, you see so many businesspeople reading a Grisham novel. The books are guileless expressions of America’s middle class. They aren’t middle America as seen and expressed by an artist; they’re middle America entertaining itself. A Grisham novel is cousin to those catalogues you find in the seat pockets of airplanes advertising desk accessories, leather business-card holders, fold-up luggage carts, pool floats and dopey gifts for the kids.

It’s bewildering, if rather sweet, in “The Firm” that the book simply assumes we’re going to identify with its main character — a nice guy, a little competitive maybe (Grisham’s concession to the fact that the guy’s actually a shark), who just wants to make money. He wants to achieve this by doing tax law, and we’re expected to say: Smart move, I can see doing that myself.

What’s on many millions of people’s minds is right there on the surface in these books. Nothing has been digested, nothing transformed. They’re as genuine and true to themselves as the work of what are usually thought of as folk artists, only the culture they issue from — middling colleges, suburbia, a couple of cars, concerns about savings plans and office politics — isn’t what we’re accustomed to thinking of as a folk culture. Even the suspense-novel frame has a middle-American purity. Grisham has spoken about learning how to do suspense from an article in Writer’s Digest: it’s a matter of lots of dialogue and action; creating a main character for people to identify with; trapping him in an evil conspiracy; closing things in around him; then getting him out.

What he puts in his books is exactly what’s in the air when you’re among hustling middle Americans. He’s one of them; he’s their boy. Here’s some of what’s in the novels:

  • The desire of middle Americans to retire early to someplace sunny.
  • Their attachment to seeing themselves as wised-up former idealists, although all they’ve ever really cared about is making money.
  • The vindictiveness they have towards media liberals, experts, technicians — “sophisticates.”
  • Their feelings of betrayal and aggrievedness. They once hoped they’d enjoy their job, and it has turned out to be a bore, and the people at the office are greedy creeps.
  • The way they live well but always feel anxious about money.
  • Their mixture of priggishness and lasciviousness. Even while they’re giving each other the eye, expressions of disgust — towards politicians, towards the aged — keep popping out of them.

The novel of his Grisham has said he cares most about is his first, “A Time to Kill.” The book involves his hero’s feelings about a case he has taken on: defending a black man accused of murdering two rednecks who raped his 10-year-old daughter. What Grisham’s hero feels angriest about is that he isn’t getting paid much for the case — which he has taken not because of any feelings about justice (it’s assumed we all agree that some people, in this case the rednecks, just deserve to die), but to get noticed.

He worries that the case will be stolen from him by a more famous lawyer. When it is, he berates the black prisoner for having ditched him in favor of the big-timer, and we’re expected to side with the main character in this scene — to agree that he’s being treated outrageously. He wins the case back — worrying some about the ethics of this — then blows a major part of the trial. He gets drunk. He stares at himself in the mirror. He pulls himself together for a winning, touchingly sincere final speech to the jury. (It’s perfect that Tom Cruise — master of willed ingenuousness — will be the first onscreen Grisham hero.) Our experience with novels leads us to expect “criticism” of such a hero for his inability to care about others. Here, the criticism never comes. The entire point is what he goes through to nail this case — essentially, to advance his career.

As a fantasy, this story is central to all of Grisham’s books. Sexually, what happens is: the Klan starts to make threats, and the main character sends his wife and daughter to his parents’ home. Instantly, a beautiful, liberal, intellectual, bra-less northern law student volunteers to assist on the case — she’s from Boston but is at school at Ole Miss. She buys beer and trades wiseass banter; she looks swell in her jeans (offering a fetching “rear view”). She does research — and her best to seduce the hero. She wants it; he does too. When things really warm up between them, she gets kidnapped by the Klan.

The scene where the Klan tortures her is the sexiest passage in Grisham, if you’re open to responding that way to this kind of thing. She’s tied facing a post in front of a burning cross. Her blouse, skirt and underwear are ripped from her back — bottom alert! The robed ones threaten to whip her; they chop her hair off and release her.

She’s alluring, she handles the complexities of the law more confidently than the hero can, and she’s a little too fast for him; she threatens to take him away from the mother-wife. So the Klan rises up and punishes her, because finally what she represents is “all crap” — one of Grisham’s, his narrator’s, and his characters’ favorite terms. The hero’s achievement in the novel is that he wins the case and he doesn’t fuck the northern girl.

Two key sentences appear in “A Time to Kill”: “he had never won an argument, in court or out, with an expert witness,” and “the embarrassment turned into anger.” These sentences express Grisham totally as a writer: resentment towards expertise, technique and sensitivity, and towards any perspective on his feelings about things.

The only other scene in Grisham that has any sexiness at all is in “The Firm.” The hero is in the Caymans, disapprovingly helping his boss launder some money, and (disapprovingly) watching the older man make out with young women. The hero rejects the advances of a few girls — rather nastily, as though their wanting to frolic made them disgusting. But then he has a few drinks, and a cute, mischievous girl in a bikini top and sarong lures him down the beach. They’re alone, it’s warm and the water is seductive. She unwraps the sarong and — she’s wearing not just a bikini bottom but a string/thong. He can’t resist playing with that string…For the rest of the novel he’s upset because he couldn’t resist fucking her. He wonders whether he should confess to his wife; we learn shortly that the beach girl was part of a conspiracy that’s entrapping the hero.

The central fantasy in all Grisham’s books is of being on the verge of puberty, getting a look at adulthood — yech, when that string comes off, it’s confusing, it’s disgusting — and managing to leap over it to a wonderful retirement where you still have your youth and looks. (This is adulthood as seen by a young boy: a matter of corruption, spies, conspiracies, wiretaps. The great thing is to outwit adulthood and get away with it.) Glimpsing power and sex, you return to Mom and escape with her to the sun, where bottoms are clean, plump and fresh –where they do nothing but arouse, and are wrapped up enticingly, like gifts and candies. Given that, it’s almost surreal to learn from published interviews that as many as two-thirds of Grisham’s readers are women, and also that he regrets having let his hero fuck the girl on the beach.

  • Buy a copy of “The Client.”
  • Francis Coppola’s film of Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” ain’t half bad. Buy a copy.
  • Though many people hated it, I loved Robert Altman’s atmospheric and satirical Grisham takeoff, “The Gingerbread Man,” starring Kenneth Branagh doing a great take on Bill Clinton.

©1993 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.