Trailer Park: The Pelican Brief
The Movie
The Pelican Brief, released December 17 1993
Trailer Synopsis
Not one but two Supreme Court justices have been assassinated, and somehow New Orleans-based law student Julia Roberts is the only one who solved the case. (Obviously she’s a Sherlock Holmes, or one of those Reachers.) Obviously there’s some kind of shadowy conspiracy, because she puts all of her findings in a document referred to as “The Pelican Brief” and anybody who sees it ends up dying. Only journalist Denzel Washington can help her, but not before there’s a lot of Cruise-esque manic running. From the author of The Firm and the director of All the President’s Men comes a movie that does not exist.
Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
Not particularly, largely because the trailer does not get across how stultifyingly dull The Pelican Brief is. I’ve been re-watching all of these Grisham adaptations, and while The Firm leaned into the airport potboiler nature of its source material, this is really a slog. That’s mildly shocking considering the people involved, as both Roberts and Washington were at the height of their early cultural influence: Washington had already won an Oscar and was coming off of Malcolm X (and would co-lead Philadelphia a week after The Pelican Brief opened), while Roberts followed up her breakout Mystic Pizza/Steel Magnolias/Pretty Woman triptych with Flatliners, Sleeping With the Enemy and Dying Young, three bad movies that were nonetheless huge hits thanks only to her presence.
The point is these two knew how to command attention and were capable of proper on-screen fireworks, but apparently not even the two most charismatic people on planet Earth at the time could not make chicken salad out of the chicken shit of the script. I read The Pelican Brief a long time ago, and it left basically no impression (whereas passages from The Firm and especially The Client still live in my bones). The plot is overly convoluted and the shadiness of the villain characters seems strangely non-committal, as though they didn’t decide what the twist would be until the day they had to shoot it.
Roberts it winning enough as plucky in-over-her-head law student Darby Shaw, who is casually banging her law professor Thomas (Sam Shepard) and inadvertently gets him killed when she shows him the titular brief. The rest of the film plays out like an chase movie slowed down to half speed, with all the portent of director Alan J. Pakula’s ‘70s thrillers but none of the grit that made them memorable. (Even though that guy made all-timers like All The President’s Men and The Parallax View, he also made junk like Starting Over and was coming off of the deeply dreary erotic thriller Consenting Adults. His final film was The Devil’s Own. He did not finish strong.)
What’s Weird About It?
Only a few months after The Firm didn’t mention Grisham once in the trailer, he’s the first name announced when trying to sell The Pelican Brief. What’s more, the trailer shouts out both The Firm and The Client, the latter of which would not be made into a movie until 1994. So the trailer was straight up plugging a different best-selling book, which is bonkers considering you could have just slapped Roberts’ face on a poster and all your marketing was done. And even before we get to the stars, we get Pakula’s name! You know, the guy who made Sophie’s Choice, a movie people forget is bad!
Also, it is wild that Washington is given so little to do in this trailer. He has the one line of conspiracy-minded dialogue, and then the editors were apparently given the mandate that they should only use his sleepiest takes. He looks so tired in this trailer! He should throw on a night cap and take a snooze on the sofa over there.
Introducing the Supreme Court as “the ultimate symbol of law and order” is a depressingly laughable statement to make in 2025.
I was with my friend Adam in a video store once, and he spotted the box for The Pelican Brief and said, “This is a movie about underwear for birds?” It made me laugh then and it still makes me laugh now.
Does It Spoil the Movie?
No, and in fact I give it credit for being as cagey as it is. We get the set-up and then we don’t get much else. I feel like the modern version of this trailer would go out of its way to explain what the title even means (the reasoning is way too convoluted, but the main villain wants to drill for oil under a bird habitat). This is one of those examples where I respect the withholding but also am mad that the movie isn’t more like what the trailer shows me.
Final Analysis
The primary participants of The Pelican Brief were simply too big to fail, and this thing dominated the holiday box office to the tune of almost $200 million in worldwide grosses. It was the eighth biggest movie released in 1993, just behind The Firm and ahead of Schindler’s List. But despite the star power involved and the box office performance, The Pelican Brief is a movie that doesn’t exist. It had no staying power in the zeitgeist, it never gets brought up when looking back at any of the principals’ careers, and it may very well be the weakest Grisham adaptation (both The Firm and The Client, the two Grisham movies that bookend this one, are significantly better). The trailer for The Pelican Brief is pretty flat, and the twist is the movie still doesn’t live up to the standard of the teaser. 3/10