Legalese review
I don’t know if it’s a slap in the face against the film or the specify of the American media, but Legalese, a 1998 courtroom satire that aired as a TNT Original talking picture of the week, looks pretty cliched seven years out. The story of cagey lawyer Norman Keane (James Garner), who specializes in defending guilty-as-sin celebrities, came effectively post-O.J., when it was already in way for the sake of the media to treat giant money defense attorneys like celebrities themselves (heck, these days we have the news of Michael Jackson recruiting Scott Peterson’s bencher reported to us as breathlessly as the A-Rod trade). Of course, the silent picture goes one better—Keane has been so overexposed he’s now stiff to rethink his scheming in commitment to reciprocally himself into an ordered bigger star.
Keane has neutral come distant of a big case—and tarnished his position by shamelessly defending someone that was doubtlessly a criminal—when into his office walks ward film star Angela Beale (Gina Gershon), newly accused of first extent murder. It seems she shot her brother-in-law, claiming it was self-defense and an essay to protect his abused sister, though all evidence indicates she was sleeping with the guy solitary a few days first. Keane knows he can win it, but he doesn’t want the known to hate him. Luckily, he runs into brassy-faced law school grad Roy Guyton (Edward Kerr), a charming guy with “a fraction of Iowa” in his part. Literally runs into him, with his motor vehicle, and when Guyton is able to combination his legal remedy mumbo-jumbo, Keane realizes he may have found just what he needs to encourage himself back on top.
Guyton is green, but, Keane explains, if Roy takes the Beale case, he can wear an earpiece and gull direction from his mentor right in the middle of a dry run. It’s not that Keane has an interest in Beale’s plight—she’s just as opportunistic as he is, and uses her “it was abuse” defense to finagle herself a talk show, Enchanting Uncivilized the Night with Angela Beale—he’s just in it for the call out (after all, on the other hand a existent genius could gain a victory in a case without ever setting foot in the courtroom).
Legalese wants to be a scornful ridicule, but it not at all quite gets there, mostly because it simply isn’t humorous. The characters are likeable enough. Garner has the charisma to be both the villain of the piece and a father numeral concerning Roy, and Kerr is appropriately low-key. But aside from a few good gags (including a wares hint where Roy tells a reporter he is wearing an earpiece because of nerve deafness, winning him the support of a nerve deafness advocacy group), but all in all, it doesn’t really say anything. Screenwriter Billy Spark had the identical sort of impose on with Shattered Glass, about a writer for a major periodical who was forced to admit he’d made up most of his stories—it’s all surface, nothing underneath, no hint of some larger satiric point. Skipper Glenn Jordan doesn’t do him any favors with his decidedly old-train TV camerawork and languid pacing.
That’s not to say the film isn’t humorous. Mary-Louise Parker has a small task as Garner’s assistant, so bewitched with Roy that she keeps taxing to evade him to have sex with her during business hours, and provides some entertainment (though she doesn’t seem to be trying too insensitive to do any more than that). Keane, whose lifelong appetite has been to land an interrogate with Ted Koppel, has to settle for tabloid vulture Brenda Whitlass (Kathleen Turner), host of a become called Scandals Unlimited, which turns every development in the Beale case into a flashy news segment (upon the revelation Beale’s sister was ill-treated, the show airs a piece called Feed-bag, Drink and Beat Mary). But other than these passing amusements, there is little in the satire of Legalese that qualifies as comedy, perhaps because the as a rule televised trial sideshow has only gotten more popular in the last seven years, and none of this seems the least touch over the top.
Rachel Chlebus