BEFORE: Matt Damon carries over from "The Monuments Men", and it's still a holiday week, which means it's a fairly slow week for TV, and a slow week for movies premiering on cable. That's great if I want to gain some more ground, if I can limit myself to just adding "Boyhood" and "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" over a 7-day span, that gets me 5 steps closer to the 150-film mark.
And yes, the cable guide lists this as "John Grisham's The Rainmaker", but I don't allow possessives in movie titles, even for authors like Grisham. IMDB says this is just "The Rainmaker", so I'm inclined to agree. Now if only the cable company would cooperate - because if you were inclined to watch this film and play along at home, you wouldn't search under "J", you'd search under "R". Right?
THE PLOT: An idealistic young lawyer and his cynical partner take on a powerful law firm representing a corrupt insurance company.
AFTER: I had "Syriana" trying to prove that the whole oil industry is corrupt, and now here's "The Rainmaker" trying to make the same point about the insurance industry. I'm inclined to agree, but isn't the goal of any company to make money? Any company that isn't turning a profit and is paying out more than it takes in simply isn't going to be around very long to serve its customers, so making money is always job #1 - I guess it just comes down to the way in which a company makes its profit.
For the Great Benefit insurance company, that's seen in the way they turned down the claim of a young man with leukemia, and refused to cover processes that might save his life, like a bone marrow transplant. A young law school grad who's studying to pass the Tennessee bar exam picks up the case from a legal aid center, and goes up against a team of more experienced lawyers working for the insurance company.
Meanwhile, he gets a job as an associate at a firm, which sends him out with a paralegal to the hospital to search for injury claims. It's not long before the firm is under investigation and he and the paralegal set up their own practice. And here the word really has two meanings, because he's a "practicing" attorney in both senses of the word.
He even juggles two other cases, both of which seem like conflicts of interest to me. OK, I never studied law, but I've watched a ton of "Law & Order" - all the different series. He helps an elderly lady with her will while he's renting a room from her, and she's so grateful she wants to make him a beneficiary. Umm, how about just a break on the rent, or is that unethical? He also meets a woman in the hospital who's being beaten by her husband, and he forms an emotional relationship with her, but there are legal ramifications of that, and what comes next in that storyline.
There's a line at the end, in voiceover, that says "Every lawyer, at least once in every case, feels himself crossing a line that he doesn't really mean to cross... it just happens... and if you cross it enough times it disappears forever." I have to disagree with this, because - in EVERY case? There are thousands of lawsuits filed in every U.S. city each year, do you really mean that lawyers cross some kind of ethical line in every single one of them? If that's true, then the legal profession is shadier than the insurance game, and I don't think that's what the author was trying to imply.
The main character here thinks of himself as an ethical man, and then when he has to resort to a bit of deception to win a case, perhaps he thinks less of himself - but at least he's aware that he's crossed a line, where many would just go with the deception and not even think twice about it. Similarly, it feels like some filmmakers cross a line when telling a story, when they take story shortcuts or use coincidences to bring people together, and if they do that too many times, they probably just get in the habit of doing that without thinking twice about it.
Also starring Danny DeVito (last seen in "Goin' South"), Claire Danes (last seen in "Me and Orson Welles"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Coming Home"), Mary Kay Place (last seen in "Private Benjamin"), Andrew Shue, Mickey Rourke (last seen in "Get Carter"), Virginia Madsen (last heard in "Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild"), Danny Glover (last heard in "Alpha and Omega"), Red West, Johnny Whitworth (last seen in "Limitless"), with cameos from Dean Stockwell (last seen in "Compulsion"), Roy Scheider (last seen in "Klute").
RATING: 5 out of 10 bags of mulch
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