director
James Foley
screenwriters
William
Goldman
Phil Alden Robinson (as "Chris Reese")
based
on the novel by
John Grisham
producers
John Davis
Brian Grazer
Ron Howard
cinematographer
Ian Baker
music
Carter Burwell
editor
Mark Warner
cast
Chris O'Donnell (Adam Hall)
Gene Hackman (Sam Cayhall)
Faye Dunaway (Lee Bowen)
Robert Prosky (Goodman)
Raymond J. Barry (Rollie Wedge)
Bo Jackson (Sergeant Packer)
Lela Rochon (Nora Stark)
David Marshall Grant (McAllister)
Nicholas Pryor (Judge Slattery)
Harve Presnell (Roxburgh)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 113m
u.s.
release: 10/11/96
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
see also:
- a time to kill
- the rainmaker
|
Is
it just me, or are movies getting awfully morbid lately?
In the past year, we've spent two hours with a parade of top-flight
actors -- Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking,
Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas,
Sharon Stone in Last Dance, and now Gene Hackman in The
Chamber -- as they prepare to join what John Cleese called
the choir invisible. The best of the long-goodbye movies (i.e.,
the first two I listed) bring us inside people who know and accept
that they're going to die. The lesser entries, such as this one,
just seem pointlessly manipulative.
The Chamber is yet another sincere legal drama based on
a novel by John Grisham (the Stephen King of the '90s), and its
hero is yet another idealistic boy lawyer (and boy wonder, with
Chris O'Donnell in the role). Watching this legal eagle, who's
actually named Adam (ah, Grisham and his Biblical references),
I wondered if Grisham had written his 1994 book in a fit of Tom
Cruise worship after seeing 1993's The Firm. Adam has
a dead father (there are enough dead dads in the Cruise portfolio
to fill a cemetery) and a mission impossible.
That mission, should Adam choose to accept it, is to keep his
racist grandfather Sam (Hackman) out of the gas chamber. Sam
is on Death Row for a 1967 bombing that killed two little boys.
He is also, as we see (vividly) in a flashback, guilty of outright
murder -- for which, ironically, he was never arrested. After
many pulse-pounding scenes of research, Adam uncovers evidence
that Sam may not be completely guilty of the crime he's slated
to die for.
As a Death Row drama, The Chamber gets the big "so
what?" from anyone who's seen Dead Man Walking. As
a study of racism handed down through generations (Adam argues
that Sam was made into what he is), the movie probes no more
deeply than did the average '50s melodrama like Giant.
As a screenplay, it's often muddled and confusing, with dialogue
that rings false as loudly as a church bell. (The culprits are
William Goldman and "Chris Reese," a pseudonym for
Field of Dreams writer-director Phil Alden Robinson.)
As a showcase for Gene Hackman, though, the movie just might
be worth your time. Hackman specializes in finding the decay
that powerful men hide behind affable façades. Here he
drops the façade -- he's far from likable as this decrepit
old cracker -- yet he's still mesmerizing. In his final scenes,
Hackman gives us a man crumbling under the weight of decades
of hatred and self-hatred. While Sam fights for his life, Hackman
fights the script's sorry attempts to soften him.
Watching Hackman behind bars, I remembered that he was once up
for the role of Hannibal Lecter in The
Silence of the Lambs. I began to envision him as Lecter,
and meanwhile the movie I was watching went on without me. The
Chamber was directed by James Foley, who proved in At
Close Range and Glengarry Glen Ross that he knows
how to point a camera at great actors. If only he knew how to
make a John Grisham story anything more than a pumped-up TV drama
(no director ever has) or how to make Chris O'Donnell interesting
(no director ever will). |