Though the Justices were seemingly at different ends of the political spectrum, the same mysterious figure pays Khamel to kill both. The sudden, violent deaths shock the nation. The rightwing President of the United States, however, relishes the chance to appoint two new Justices and shape the future of the country for generations to come.
The murders intrigue young law student Darby Shaw. She researches the two Justices to find out what they have in common. The result of her research is contained in a summary that comes to be known as the pelican brief, in which she suggests that the murders were financially rather than politically motivated. Darby shows the brief to Thomas Callahan , a famous law professor at her university who is also her lover. Callahan shows the brief to his friend Verheek, who works for the FBI. The brief makes its way around in Washington, but many dismiss it.
He is killed instantly, but Darby escapes. Suspicious people accost Darby, but she sneaks away to a hotel. Darby goes on the run, fleeing whoever might be chasing her and whoever killed her lover. She tries to meet with Verheek, but Khamel kills him and impersonates him in a meeting with Darby. Just as Khamel is about to kill her, a mysterious person shoots Khamel and disappears. Darby escapes again.
A man who only identifies himself as Garcia contacts famous news reporter Gray Grantham. Garcia offers information about the assassinations that he discovered at his law firm. However, he does not want to come forward. Doing research, however, she discovers a connection, and writes a brief that, if true, would implicate one of the richest men in the country, and lead to the Oval Office. Roberts is encouraged in her work by her law professor and lover Sam Shepard.
The movie uses shorthand for its character traits; the Shepard character is a recovering alcoholic who drinks or doesn't drink entirely according to the needs of the dialogue. No matter; soon he's gone, and Roberts has been targeted by sinister forces. She turns for help first to the FBI, and then to an investigative journalist Washington. The screenplay keeps its cards close to its chest.
We see various scoundrels who seem guilty, but there's no proof until late in the film, and a lot of blind alleys.
Some amusement is offered by the character of the President, played by smiling, bland Robert Culp as a man with the appearance of George Bush and the involvement of Ronald Reagan.
There are some obvious villains, including the President's chief of staff Tony Goldwyn , but the movie depends on ominous threats and sudden deaths rather than on colorful, memorable bad guys.
Because the atmosphere is skillfully drawn, because the actors are well cast and because Pakula knows how to construct a sequence to make it work, the movie delivers while it's onscreen. That it contains no substance or meaning is not its problem. It is a clever device to take your mind off your problems for minutes. I enjoyed it until it was over; I will have little reason to think about it in the weeks to come; I will forget it in a year. It is depressing to reflect that this shallow exercise in Washington conspiracy has been directed by the same man who made a great film, "All the President's Men," on the same subject.
Depressing, too, to remember that both films center on the work of investigative newspapermen - Woodward and Bernstein, who were smart, aggressive and political in the earlier film, and Washington's character, who is smart, brave, shallow and utterly apolitical in this one.
One thing the movie proves conclusively is the value of star power. Julia Roberts, returning after two years off the screen, makes a wonderful heroine - warm, courageous, very beautiful. Denzel Washington shows again how credible he seems on the screen; like Spencer Tracy , he can make you believe in almost any character. That was one. The second is much easier to describe: The Pelican Brief is utterly, obnoxiously visually plain. This was predestined the moment that Pakula teamed up for the second time with Stephen Goldblatt, his Consenting Adults cinematographer - leastways, it was if you agree with me that Consenting Adults had to that point been the director's most visually undistinguished movie.
The Pelican Brief probably tops it, though: while Pakula's blocking is significantly better than it was in the last film, and the use of camera angles is generally more thoughtful there is a return to the long-forgotten "Pakula Shot" - an extreme wide angle of two people engaged in some significant piece of business - and some very nicely-executed bird's-eye-view shots , the images are nonetheless inordinately flat, with absolutely functional use of focal depth, and perfunctory, uninflected lighting: it's not just that it looks boring, it looks so boring that it damn well hurts.
It is so boring that it makes you want to sleep and not have to keep looking at it. The third flaw: Julia Roberts. Okay, so back in the day I was one of those reflexively anti-Roberts people, but I have grown some sense since then her extremely fruitful relationship with Steven Soderbergh helped that process a lot.
But I still think it demonstrably true that she isn't a natural actress. A natural movie star, without a doubt. But it takes some doing to coax a good performance out of her, and in this stage of her career, nobody had really figured out how to do that yet if you say Pretty Woman , I will cut you. I will fucking cut you over the internet , although Pakula, always a good director of actors, did his best. But whatever causes it, I find that too much of her performance is at a '30s movie register of "bigness" at odds with every other element of the movie.
And even the good parts of her performance feel like her absolute best impersonation of how Holly Hunter would play the role with a Midwestern accent.
So in the face of those crippling flaws, what can the film offer us that is good? Well, even when we don't know what's going on, it's a nicely high-momentum thriller that keeps going too quickly for us to stop and notice the smaller plot contrivances, and like I said, there are a few particular setpieces where Pakula seems to have woken up for the first time in 15 years and remembered how exactly you're supposed to make a movie.
It's the right mood for the filmmaker, that's what does it. Maybe no-one, and almost certainly no American, has ever surpassed Pakula for creating a tone of sheer paranoia through camera perspective and editing, always keeping us trapped in a bubble with the main character, who is constantly aware of the number of ways that somebody else might be about to kill them.
And of course, like his classic paranoia trilogy, The Pelican Brief posits a world in which everyone is out to secure their own measure of power at the expense of absolutely everyone else, meaning that the universe itself is out to get the characters. If the film doesn't match the heights of, say, The Parallax View in creating that kind of world, I guess it's largely because it is lousy with problems. But you can see the shape of what it should look like; and that's at least some compensation.
Even this late into unrecoverable mediocrity, Pakula could remember what it meant to be a great filmmaker; it is both touching and frustrating that The Pelican Brief should come so close to being good without quite finding a way out of its own Hollywood-bound inconsequence.
Categories: alan j pakula , mysteries , political movies , thrillers. Youth in Revolt. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.
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