Trailer Park: The Firm

Movie
The Firm, released June 30 1993

Trailer Synopsis
Tom Cruise is a newly-minted hotshot lawyer recruited by an august law firm that is almost certainly up to something shady. They are so shady, in fact, that lawyers keep dying and both Gene Hackman and Wilford Brimley work hard to threaten our baby-faced bad boy. He thinks the whole job—with its six-figure salary and its Mercedes lease and a deal on a cute house—is a dream but his super hot wife Jeanne Tripplehorn thinks it might be too good to be true. You know how we, the audience, know something is getting a little too dark and twisted? When Gary Busey shows up! The director of Three Days of the Condor and, uh, Tootsie (and Cruise’s future co-star in Eyes Wide Shut) brings you a thriller that involves a lot of old guys tossing around furtive glances.

Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
I would say yes, with the caveat that the last few bits in the trailer make The Firm seem like an action-heavy movie, and it is definitively not that. But it mostly gets it right. Cruise plays the hilariously named Mitch McDeere, who just graduated from Harvard Law School and gets heavily recruited by the Memphis-based outfit Bendini, Lambert & Locke. They’re a relatively small operation compared to some of the bigger outfits who want to welcome Mitch into the fold, but the money is long and the benefits are sweet (just as long as you don’t get shot to death, I guess). It turns out BL&L’s biggest client is a major crime family, and they do their criminal accounting while also ripping off their other clients. The more Mitch finds out the twitchier he gets, and the twitchier he gets the more he fields threats from senior partner Avery Tolar (Hackman) and head of security Bill DeVasher (Brimley). Fearing for his life and the lives of his wife (Tripplehorn) and brother (David Strathairn), he gets involved in a scheme to blow the whole thing up that involves a private detective (Busey), his assistant (Holly Hunter), and an FBI agent (Ed Harris). That is an absolute murderer’s row of talent, and even when the material (based on the breakout novel by then-ascendent airport paperback king John Grisham) gets goofy there’s always a cool scene full of operatic menace just around the corner.  

What’s Weird About It?
Even though this was the first adaptation of one of his novels, it’s a little surprising Grisham doesn’t get a shout-out at all. When the time came to promote this thing, all of Grisham’s books to that point (A Time To Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client) were bestsellers at the same time (he and Crichton pretty much owned the New York Times list in that era). The fact that this was the first of his books made into a movie would have been a big deal! But there’s no mention of Grisham here, nor that both legendary screenwriter Robert Towne and award-winning playwright David Rabe both have credits on the adaptation.

In fact, even though this was obviously presented as a Cruise vehicle (he was fresh off A Few Good Men), the first name that shows up in this trailer is Sydney Pollack. That’s not especially unusual, as he was a guy with some name recognition who made a name for himself an Oscar darling following back-to-back victories with Tootsie and Out of Africa. But this wasn’t a Pollack passion project or anything. In fact, he came on pretty late in the process to replace John McTiernan (he made Last Action Hero instead), who had already replaced Saturday Night Fever director John Badham.  

The score to The Firm was largely solo piano music care of Dave Grusin (it’s lovely and haunting, and he got an Oscar nomination for it), but the music in the trailer comes from one of James Horner’s themes from Sneakers, which had come out a year earlier.

Also is this the beginning of Tom Cruise: Movie Runner? He does a full-suit sprint at the end of this thing.

Does It Spoil the Movie?
He has a lot of good lines that signal the ominousness of the whole endeavor, but if I were cutting this thing today I wouldn’t put any of Wilford Brimley in there. The reveal that everybody’s grandpa was actually the law firm’s button man is pretty juicy, and it would have been worth treating it like a spoiler. You could make the argument that everyone who saw the trailer would already know the firm is evil (which would sort of negate the first act), but the film also makes that case pretty clear. The senior partners at Bendini, Lambert & Locke only ever come across as sinister, which is almost certainly the point.

Final Analysis
Movies like The Firm (expensive star vehicles based on popular books and made for grown-ups) used to be fairly common but are basically unicorns now. There’s something extremely comforting about the way this trailer operates, but I recognize that’s largely based on nostalgia. Still, it was effective at the time: The Firm was a sizeable box office hit, and in addition to the nod for Grusin it also earned an Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Holly Hunter (she lost to Anna Paquin for The Piano; Grusin lost to John Williams’ Schindler’s List music). The Firm is a tight thriller made by professionals that has largely been forgotten in the zeitgeist (a fate of basically every Grisham adaptation, to be honest), and the trailer does exactly what it’s supposed to do and nothing more. 7/10