THE LINCOLN LAWYER: In Cold Blood

posted by Brandon Nowalk

I felt dirtier walking out of Brad Furman’s THE LINCOLN LAWYER than its idol THE LONG GOODBYE, and not just because all that hero worship makes us into peeping toms. When Phillip Marlowe starts walking the hard road back to civilization, he’s a changed man. When THE LINCOLN LAWYER reaches its franchise moment, Matthew McConaughey is playing to type, as slick and carefree as the Hollywood escapism around him. Only I was burdened with the angst the film doesn’t realize it stirred up. Only I felt the consequences.

It’s not that the film is torn between twin motives, Solomon’s baby pulled on one side by its flashy stage mom and on the other by its distant professor father. It’s mom all the way. Sure, it begins with McConaughey on top of his world, a fortune in desperate need of a reversal, and the first act argues that even the worst criminal deserves his day in court, but that tenet of American justice is thrown by the wayside without so much as a memo from John Yoo as soon as the film realizes it’s having more fun ensnaring McConaughey than teaching him anything. Thus, the aforementioned happy-go-lucky ending, Philip Marlowe laughing all the way to the bank. He’s soiled, but he won. All right, all right!

But the film gets into thorny territory even if its pot-addled hero doesn’t realize it. Most specifically THE LINCOLN LAWYER barrels over questions of how the US justice system ought to deal with sociopaths, from trial to punishment, invariably siding with violence, whether in its exploitative flashbacks of visceral crimes to its bloodlust in making the real killer pay. McConaughey is positively giddy about the prospect of slipping the needle in the guy’s wrist, and we are supposed to be blindly thankful justice is being served. Don’t you worry your little head, Spicoli, Jr.’s gonna take care of everything.

For those untroubled by punitive justice, there’s another problem, and I’m not talking about source author Michael Connelly’s fetish for the extreme twist, a plot point so improbable it must be true, as anyone who’s seen Clint Eastwood’s BLOOD WORK can attest. No, the problem with B-thrillers in the legal arena is that you can turn on your TV right now and somewhere, on some channel is a decent courtroom procedural to satisfy your needs, from the exploitative LAW & ORDER: SVU to the progressive-to-a-fault BOSTON LEGAL to the genuinely complicated inquiry into the failures of US justice THE GOOD WIFE, which is soapy enough to beat THE LINCOLN LAWYER in the escapism department, to boot. So, here we have a staggering cast, near walk-on roles filled out with the likes of Frances Fisher and Bryan Cranston, and a glossy look thanks to DV and a lot of warm, natural light, and an interesting plot (though it might be more exciting shortened to 43 minutes and thrown on CBS) all in the unimaginative service of vengeance we can believe in. It would be appalling if THE LINCOLN LAWYER had any idea that’s what it was doing.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 10:36 pm. It is filed under Adaptations, Blog, Brandon Nowalk, Crime, Drama, Los Angeles, Reviews, Thrillers, Violence in Film and tagged with 2011, Brad Furman, film review, legal thriller, Matthew McConaughey, The Lincoln Lawyer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.