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Who'll stop the rain? >> Francis Ford Coppola hits rock bottom with The Rainmaker by MATTHEW HAYS
Things didn't sound too good from the get-go, what with Coppola settling on that much-overused, overseen and overrated legal-pulp-novelist John Grisham for source material. Grisham's novels have worked well as fodder for fluffy entertainment movies like The Client, but The Rainmaker's turf feels far, far too well-trodden. The fresh-faced Matt Damon plays a fresh-faced wannabe lawyer who joins on with a shady firm run by sleazebag Mickey Rourke (perfectly cast). Damon is handed a number of cases, and while he's instructed by his mentor (Danny DeVito) to think like an ambulance chaser, Damon's heart is just too big and he's soon drawn into the pathos of each case. Johnny Whitworth plays a young man struck down by leukemia; after his family is denied the money necessary for a bone marrow transplant on the basis that it is too experimental, Damon is sent in to sue the insurance company for everything he can. Mary Kay Place (an Emmy-winner for her role in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) plays Whitworth's suffering mom. And supplying the love interest is Claire Danes, as a battered wife who Damon is desperate to free from the clutches of her tortured marriage. If it all sounds rather drearily clichéd, then I'm describing it perfectly. Jon Voight steps in as the head lawyer defending the insurance company, and it's little wonder the film's costume designer didn't hand him a black hat, just to make his evil heart stick out all the more. And that's what's most striking about Coppola's latest: the grey zone of human morality that was so perfectly suggested by much of his great work is gone here. He has settled for a cops-and-robbers, black-and-white depiction of human nature that makes the average Sunday night movie-of-the-week look like Dostoevsky by comparison. The only fun lies in the film's far-out casting, much of which comes in surprising unbilled cameos. When Coppola's appeal can best be summed up as Hollywood Squares at feature length, you know the director's hit rock bottom. Opens Friday, Nov. 21. See film listings for showtimes
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Watching The Rainmaker, one is left with a sense of wonder. Not at subtle, intelligent filmmaking, not at keen, surprising screenwriting, not at a fitting musical score--because the film has none of these things. No, the question of wonder hanging over The Rainmaker is: how did the filmmaker behind such brilliance as The Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation end up with his name on a film this rotten? For a few moments I entertained the idea that a different person with the same name had directed it, but I perused the press kit and found a photo of the same Coppola. Nope, no impostor--it's him all right.