A friend of mine who teaches public school told me of asking her
seventh-graders to write an essay about a dream they harbored that would change
their lives should it come true. She expected her students to respond with
fantasies of athletic triumph or film stardom, or perhaps election to political
office. One or two, she figured, might write of winning the lottery. Instead of
old-fashioned dreams like these, however, more than half her class wrote about
their hopes of winning a lawsuit. That's a chilling revelation of what has
happened to American civil law practice: average people seeing the law as a way
to enrich themselves. Such people, one gathers, think of winning a lawsuit
against the deep pockets of a corporate entity, of an insurance company in
particular, as an opportunity to put money in their own pockets without taking
it out of someone else's. But that's entirely wrong, of course. And that's why
auto insurance is so outrageously expensive in Louisiana and why the recent
ridiculous $5 billion judgment in the Gentilly tank car case sent a serious
chill down the spine of our fragile local economy. That's also a chief reason
why I detested The Rainmaker, the latest John Grisham tale to land at
your neighborhood multiplex.
Adapted for the screen and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The
Rainmaker is in most ways a typical Grisham David-and-Goliath story. Rudy
Baylor (Matt Damon) is fresh out of a Memphis law school when he lands a client
with a major case against a health insurance company. Donny Ray Black (Johnny
Whitworth) is dying of leukemia, and the Great Benefit Insurance Company has
denied him a bone marrow transplant, which might save his life. Teaming up with
ambulance-chasing law school graduate and repeated bar exam failure Deck
Shifflet (Danny DeVito), Rudy sues for $10 million after waving off paltry
settlement offers of $50 thousand and then $75 thousand from Great Benefit's
chief attorney, Leo Drummond (Jon Voight). When Donny Ray doesn't survive until
the trial gets under way, Rudy carries on for Donny Ray's brave, angry mother,
Dot (Mary Kay Place). In case you've never seen a Grisham-based film before, I
won't reveal how it comes out.
DeVito is always fun to watch on screen. Nobody does likable sleazeballs better
than him. And though Place has done the grizzled working-class woman before,
she's quite effective here. Other than that, though, The Rainmaker
suffers from all the flaws I repeatedly find so irritating in Grisham's work.
For a guy who was a working attorney before he got filthy rich writing about
made-up young barristers, he sure seems ignorant of lots of things having to do
with the practice of law. Start with his title. In the legal profession, the
term "rainmaker" is used to denote powerful attorneys with huge client bases.
Rainmakers produce so much work that all their partners and associates get rich
handling their cases. There is no rainmaker in The Rainmaker.
There's just a lot of sloppiness about this film. When Rudy gets out of law
school, he immediately associates with a shady lawyer named Bruiser Stone
(Mickey Rourke doing a parody of his own reliable sliminess). Why? We're asked
to believe that Rudy is a smart, hard-working kid, right? So didn't he get good
grades in law school? And if he did, why is Bruiser the best he can do for a
partner? Moreover, once he learns Bruiser's terms, why does Rudy agree to join
up? Bruiser tells Rudy that he'll be responsible for bringing in his own cases,
won't get paid unless he does and will have to fork over two-thirds of what he
brings in to Bruiser. What's the upside? Given all this build-up, we think
Rudy's relationship with Bruiser is going to be somehow important, but it
isn't. A dead-end subplot about Bruiser being suspected of federal racketeering
is introduced, and Bruiser disappears from the picture save for a single, late
and improbable cameo.
A similar box canyon is built around Rudy's relationship with Kelly Riker
(Clare Danes), a young jewelry store employee trapped in a horrible marriage.
After a lesson from Deck in the fine art of ambulance chasing, Rudy is
instructed by Bruiser to sign up Kelly, who is in the hospital after being
savagely beaten by her husband, Cliff (Andrew Shue). That whole notion, of
course, is as half-baked as everything else in this flick. Exactly who is it
that Rudy is going to convince Kelly to sue? Cliff doesn't have anything. But,
of course, it provides Rudy a love interest and helps show us that he's a good
guy because he's against wife abuse. When Cliff is subsequently killed, we
think for an astonished moment that the whole movie is going to lurch off into
a crime thriller. But that's just a happenstantial reason for what the whole
Kelly subplot actually is: a time filler.
There's other clumsy stuff, too. Rudy's chief witness against Great Benefit
turns out to be a disgruntled former company employee named Jackie Lemanczyk
(Virginia Madsen), who is discovered in another crummy bit of plotting at the
last minute. At the climax, Roy Scheider shows up as Great Benefit CEO Wilfred
Keeley. Scheider seems practically comatose, embarrassed into an awkward
silence, no doubt, by being forced to wear an outfit that was last seen on
Dennis Rodman at one of his infamous book signings. What is this powder-blue
sweater suit about, Mr. Coppola?
But the real reason to loathe The Rainmaker is for the soft-headed way
in which it asks us to root for an unreasonable, gigantic punitive damage
award. I'm certainly not saying that insurance companies can't prove
bureaucratically infuriating, heartless and even criminally corrupt. Of course
they can. And I'm certainly not saying that juries should not make insurance
companies pay legitimate claims. I'm not even against punitive damages. But I
am against unreasonable punitive damages, which have become commonplace in
recent years. Let us not forget that insurance companies provide a needed
social service. They protect us all against the accident of undeserved
misfortune. To do so, they've got to be able to stay in business. And they
can't stay in business and can't charge reasonable rates if juries hand out
unwarranted punitive damages, making selected individuals wildly rich. It
appears that only the insurance company pays. And to that end, Coppola and
Grisham actually stop the action late in The Rainmaker to make a
political statement against those who advocate tort reform and caps on punitive
damages (this in the service of attorneys who take up to 40 percent of the sums
awarded their clients!). But the insurance company is, finally, only a kind of
middle-man. It writes the check, but the rest of us actually end up paying.
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