A Film Canon

In style, tone and pace, The Rainmaker - six hours in its original incarnation - feels like the real conclusion to Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy. The languorous, distended ambience of John Grisham's American South lends itself perfectly to the relaxed, slow-paced storytelling of Coppola's 70s output, and is only enhanced by Grisham's first foray into the peculiarly peripatetic lifestyle of personal injury lawyers, which centers on graduate Ruby Bayler (Matt Damon) and huckster Deck Shifflet's (Danny DeVito) efforts to prosecute Great Benefit Insurance, represented by Leo Drummond (Jon Voigt). Subsuming personal injury into melancholy flanerie, Coppola takes us on a veritable tour of uninsured Memphis, shot through with a distinctively 70s taste for urban decay - which is to say a distinctively 70s nostalgia for classical Hollywood, conjuring up a time when houses, courthouses and theatres met at the same shadowy, dusty corner, the same ambrosial, imaginary small-town infrastructure. From that perspective, the casting of Teresa Wright is utterly inspired, the shadow of dusky doubt that lingers over every doorframe, but the layered timeframes don't tend to produce second-order nostalgia so much as a sense that the 80s and 90s never happened, in a poetic testament to the timelessness of 70s nostalgia and neo-noir, which was about creating a continual present as much as an idealized past. In keeping with this widescreen approach, Coppola grafts the sight-lines of the courtroom onto the city, tending to keep his camera just below eye-level, and favoring the threshold between medium and long distance shots. In doing so, he beautifully evokes a receding antebellum skyline, a corollary to the etiquette of approaching the witness, the line between examination and cross-examination, that becomes so critical when the case finally gets to trial: "Every lawyer, at least once in every case, finds himself crossing a line he doesn't want to cross." With another director, this emphasis on atmospherics might occlude Grisham's ethical voice, but Coppola simply burnishes it, keeping just enough distance from the narrative to give it a systemic edge, with the result that the issue of whether or not Great Benefit are culpable becomes almost indiscernibly irrelevant, part of a wider meditation on the very existence of private health care at all. In fact, as the only space in the film that's likely to be securely insured, the courtroom comes to feel about the least relevant, or even existent, given Coppola's suggestion that architecture only comes into visibility by virtue of not being insured, just as health only comes into visibility without a public health system to maintain it. It's by far the strongest Grisham adaptation, and one of the most stunning efforts of Coppola's career, if only because it's one of the quietest, utterly eschewing the self-reinvention that's fascinated his films since One From The Heart.