Maybe the best of the ’90s John Grisham adaptations?
Back when this movie first came out, I remember reading a piece (I want to say in ‘Entertainment Weekly?’): the writer watches Julia Roberts film the scene where her boyfriend’s car explodes. The writer describes her performance, as her face transforms from giddy and drunk, to the shock and horror that would give way to body-wracking sobs. “Cut!” Director Alan J. Pakula comesover to Roberts and, still shaking, she looks at him, ready for his adjustments before going for the next take. Wow.
As with Pakula’s best known political thrillers, The Pelican Brief has dated well. In between its genuinely thrilling set pieces, The Pelican Brief is perhaps most remarkably characterised by understatement and a quiet confidence in its dry dialogue about byzantine connections between corrupt politicians, oligarchs, and the deep state. The only thing about The Pelican Brief that isn’t timely is that its first act setup takes its quaint ’90s time – and it is absolutely worth the wait.
Law student Darby Shaw (Roberts) writes a legal theory, the titular brief, which implicates the White House in an assassination plot. Before she knows it, she’s being chased by an assortment of bad guys out to kill her and apparently eachother (including Stanley Tucci doing some amazing accent work, and Nicholas Woodeson doing… all kinds of stuff with his face). Shaw turns to intrepid reporter Gray Grantham (Denzel Washington) for help, not in hiding, but in uncovering the truth.
Excellent ’70s thriller in remarkable ’90s packaging.
The dynamic between Shaw and Grantham is refreshingly un-romantic – something which only seems wild because both leads are insanely hot in this, and it’s difficult to imagine that not being a plot point in a film version of this made today (what is it with fantastic movies of this era that managed this – looking at you, 1992’s A Few Good Men). Grantham may be following Shaw’s lead, as he tells his editor (John Lithgow – even he’s understated here), because “that’s the only way she’ll play it”. But Denzel plays Grantham as projecting professional respect, and even admiration, for Shaw. Her life is in danger, and Shaw’s response isn’t to run and hide but to fight. The two match eachother’s investigative skills, ingenuity, and courage, and they quickly become a dynamic duo. I haven’t looked up the movie trivia, but i’m certain they at least filmed, if not test screened, an alternate, more explicitly romantic version of the airport scene at the end… whoever championed us the perfect version we got: brava.
The Pelican Brief is beautifully styled and shot, and scored by James Horner with the requisite crash-bang piano popularised by this genre generally, and ’90s film adaptations of John Grisham novels specifically (my personal favourite is The Firm, 1993). Yes, it has chase sequences, but so outnumbered in minutes are they by the austere dialogue scenes that The Pelican Brief makes my movies about people talking playlist.
Further Viewing
The 1990s were blessed with a bunch of these political thrillers – Pop Culture Happy Hour rates the Top 5 John Grisham adaptations (via NPR):