ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 27, 1996 TAG: 9607290017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B-12 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
What makes a courtroom drama really work is a sense of uncertainty about the outcome of a case, and a character - defendant or victim - the audience grows to care about. It helps if one side is badly outmatched by the other in resources and experience - as in "The Verdict," which pitted down-on-his-luck, alcoholic attorney Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) against James Mason, whose character might as well have been named God.
It was a real David and Goliath story, and it turned on several key facts - a sufficient number of which came as a complete surprise.
"A Time to Kill," a sort of modern-day "To Kill a Mockingbird" tale, written by John Grisham, offers up the most sympathetic murderer one can possibly imagine: Samuel Jackson's Carl Lee Hailey, who has killed two men in vengeance for the rape and brutal beating of his 10-year-old daughter.
And it gives us one side - the defendant's - badly outmatched by the other. Hailey's attorney, Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey, the newest Tom Cruise knockoff), can't even pay the utility bills at his one-man law office. The opposition, prosecutor Rufus Buckley (Kevin Spacey), knows everyone and everything. Furthermore, he has lots of experience, gubernatorial aspirations - and a very cushy office.
Still, somehow, "A Time To Kill" - in spite of terrific performances from Jackson and Spacey - is so utterly lacking in dramatic tension, so bereft of surprise and perfunctory in its treatment of the violence the case spawns, it's as if the verdict has been in the audience's hands from the start.
That's because there is no gray area or room for debate. There are simply good guys and bad guys. Brigance, his boring wife (Ashley Judd) and adorable daughter, lawyer friend Harry (Oliver Platt) and newfound comrade Ellen (Sandra Bullock) are all good guys. So is the black sheriff (Charles S. Dutton), Brigance's mentor Lucien Wilbanks (Donald Sutherland), and, of course, the defendant and his family.
The bad guys are, well, everybody else. None of them are black. Even the young men who toss a Molotov cocktail onto a Klan grand dragon, burning him to death at a protest march, get soft treatment. As does the NAACP, which comes to Canton, Miss., with hopes of getting major publicity mileage out of a local crime story involving racial issues - with little concern for how the defendant will best be served.
Only one of the victims' mothers gets a warm glance from the camera. She is, after all, an innocent - no matter what her bigoted, brutal son did during his life.
Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (who also adapted ``The Client'') apparently decided that this story wasn't about whether it is right or wrong to take the law into one's own hands. So the audience isn't given a chance to think for itself or develop much interest in how it all comes out. What mattered to the filmmakers was how passionately the audience could be made to despise the bad guys - and love the good guys.
And a good movie ought to always aim for a higher goal than that.
A Time to Kill HH1/2
A Warner Bros. release showing at Valley View Mall 6 and Tanglewood Mall. Rated R for violence and disturbing subject matter. 2 hours and 25 minutes.
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Samuel L. Jackson is on trial for murder in `A Time toby CNBKill.' color.