Pollack: The Firm (1993)

The Firm was John Grisham’s breakthrough novel and the first to receive a film adaptation, setting the tone and texture for a staggering amount of 90s cinema in the process. It revolves around Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise), a prodigious young lawyer who’s poached straight out of Harvard by Bendini, Lambert and Locke, a family values firm from Memphis that prides itself on not counting a single divorcee among its staff, nor a single woman among its partners. However, as McDeere and his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) quickly learn from mentor Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), nobody has left the firm in the last twenty years and lived to tell the tale either. At first that seems like mere coincidence, until McDeere gradually gleans that the firm may just be an outgrowth of the occult South, the latest in a long line of shadowy confederacies and confraternities that lurk around the fringes of the film as so many inchoate glissandoes of suspicion, trickles of half-formed apprehension. Taken collectively, they make for an even more Southern Gothic Grisham than Robert Altman’s adaptation of The Gingerbread Man, a critique of the corporation as one of the most old-fashioned, oak-encrusted American institutions. As a result, a great deal of the film’s power comes from the way it moves between these hallowed repositories of hyper-regionalism and their offshore holdings, collapsing downtown Memphis into the Hyatt Grand Cayman in a kind of fever dream of what happens when you displace your assets as far South as economically imaginable. Jumping between country clubs and scuba sites, Pollack produces such surreal, disorienting juxtapositions that all space in the film seems somewhat hyperreal, just as every supposedly venerated or antiquated Southern interior feels like something of a pastiche, while the exquisitely curated establishing shots offer something like a survey of postmodern architecture as it stood in the early 90s, culminating with an utterly mindblowing sequence set on Memphis’ Mud Island Monorail. Like so many of Pollack’s films from this period, then, it’s extraordinarily atmospheric - so atmospheric, in fact, that it’s always on the verge of overlaying everything with a bucolic, pastoral, telemovie South. Yet that just makes the Gothic elements even more elliptical and unsettling, forcing Cruise into some of his most poised and unusual transitions to date, and cementing what has to be one of Pollack's greatest films of the 90s.