Trailer Park: The Client

Movie
The Client, released July 20 1994

Trailer Synopsis
Tommy Lee Jones is an unscrupulous lawyer who, based on his accent, is a direct descendent of Foghorn Leghorn. He’s trying to get some information out of tween Brad Renfro, who may or may not have been in a car he was not supposed to be in before the owner died. Jones tells him he doesn’t need a lawyer while he sips milk from a carton he must have bought in an elementary school lunch room, but Renfro is recording him and it turns out he does need a lawyer! Enter Susan Sarandon, who stands up for the boy’s civil rights but also maybe exposes him to some kind of organized crime who want him dead. Will Jones get Renfro on the stand? When you write it out like that it really doesn’t sound terribly compelling does it? The director of Flatliners brings you a taut thriller care of beach read rainmaker John Grisham.

Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
It does! Outside of its psychologically tense opening sequence, The Client doesn’t have any more kinetic activity than The Pelican Brief and The Firm but is an infinitely more viscerally entertaining film. That has to be thanks to Joel Schumacher, who has a rather checkered legacy largely thanks to Batman & Robin but who knows how to put together high-end popcorn entertainment like The Lost Boys and Falling Down. Grisham books are pulpy, and The Client is the first adaptation of his work that understands that trash culture tone.

Renfro plays Mark Sway, an 11-year-old kid who is playing in the woods when he finds a running car in the middle of a clearing. Realizing there’s a hose running from the tailpipe into the vehicle, Mark tries to prevent the suicide attempt but runs afoul of mob lawyer Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz), who pulls Mark into the car, gives a long monologue about a hitman and a dead senator before blowing his brains out. Mark flees, but he’s an 11-year-old so gets caught right away and put in front of US attorney Roy Foltrigg (Jones). Foltrigg wants to know the location of a dead body, and he believes Jerome told Mark this information before he shuffled off this mortal coil. Mark is terrified so he pleads the fifth and retains recovering alcoholic lawyer Reggie Love (Sarandon), who spends the rest of the movie negotiating with Foltrigg, lecturing Mark, and driving to New Orleans to dig up the body of a murder victim. It must have been impossible to hire a seasoned scene-stealing character actor while The Client was in production, because they’re all in there: Will Patton, William H. Macy, Mary-Louise Parker, Anthony LaPaglia, Ossie Davis, Anthony Edwards, Kim Coates, Bradley Whitford and J.T. Walsh are all present and accounted for.

What’s Weird About It?
Outside of Jones’ truly ludicrous accent (he must have had some left over from his work on JFK, another Louisiana-set potboiler), not a ton really. This is a very good sell job for what is a very entertaining movie, and at the time the big selling point was the arrival of Renfro, who was making his film debut and who really truly has to carry the bulk of the drama. Renfro ended up leading a heartbreaking life that sent him to an early grave (he overdosed in 2008; he was only 25), but you can see why people uttered his name and a still-ascendant Leonardo DiCaprio’s in the same breath circa ’94. The trailer doesn’t go out of its way to announce the debut of a new star, but he gets a lot of good real estate and you end up walking away thinking he’s going to be something special.

It’s not that weird per se, but I’m always jarred by any trailer that announces the title of the movie before the very end. My guess would be that The Client was already a recognizable commodity and maybe they wanted to front load it?

Here’s a wild one: Tommy Lee Jones is not identified as “Academy Award Winner Tommy Lee Jones” even though this was the first movie that came out following his victory for The Fugitive. Could this trailer have been cut together before Jones won in March of that year? I guess it’s possible, though that would have been easily changed even considering 1994 technology. I can only assume they just didn’t care about his awards status. Susan Sarandon is also not identified as an Academy Award Nominee; she had already lost three times and would lose one more before collecting her prize for Dead Man Walking in 1996. That fourth loss? For The Client!

This trailer also doesn’t so much build to a climax as it does just kind of stop. That end moment when Mark says “I’m scared” and then it just cuts to the credit block is pretty jarring and strange. All told, this is a weird set of rhythms for a trailer for the kind of movie this is.

Does It Spoil the Movie?
Most of the movie is in there. In fact, it kind of painstakingly gives away the first act from when we first meet Mark to when he hires Reggie and she gets one over on Foltrigg. I will give them credit for playing up the mystery of what Clifford said to Mark in the car, which does send the third act into motion.

Final Analysis
I had always ranked The Firm slightly ahead of The Client for the top spot in the Grisham Movie Power Rankings, but in revisiting both I think I prefer the latter. Grisham’s books are well-made but ultimately pulpy trash, and Schumacher was the perfect director to capture this kind of Southern-fried nonsense on film. The Client is helped tremendously by great performances across the board and a sweaty quality that I really like. It had a hard time standing out in the summer of ‘94 behind juggernauts like Forrest Gump, True Lies, The Mask and The Lion King, but it legged it out to $92 million on the back of solid reviews and good word of mouth. Sarandon got her fourth Oscar nomination (she lost to Jessica Lange for Blue Sky, another Tommy Lee Jones joint; Winona Ryder should have won for Little Women) and collected a BAFTA for her troubles. There was so much excitement for it that it spawned a short-lived TV series that aired on CBS for a single season and cast JoBeth Williams and John Heard as Love and Foltrigg (though with a different narrative than the Mark Sway case). Most importantly, it kept the Grisham train rolling. I have foggier memories of The Chamber, The Runaway Jury and The Rainmaker, and it’s possible those trailers will be better than this one. But as pulpy legal thrillers go, The Client is the golden precedent. 6/10