MORE ON MOVIES: While I’m at it, I saw “The Firm” recently, and I liked it – not as a “think” movie, but simply as an enjoyable chase/thriller movie. At the same time, there’s a conceit that gains prominence at the end of the movie, which I’m hoping must be intentionally comic.

The Tom Cruise character makes a big deal over the fact that he’s gotten the bad guys at The Firm without violating the attorney-client privilege because this, horror of horrors, could get him kicked out of the bar. First, there’s something incredibly selfish about this, as he puts his ability to practice law in the future, against getting the mob. I mean, which is the higher call? I know there’s something called professional responsibility, but our role morality is constrained by morality in general, and even derives from it.

Second, Cruise is big on attorney client privilege, but he doesn’t stop short of committing all sorts of crimes – for example, he basically breaks into the offices of his other law partners and Xeroxes confidential information. And this is the least of it. He coerces the FBI into getting his brother out of prison (and along the way, does an illegal wire tap). Why are these laws unimportant in getting the bad guys, and attorney client privilege? And while we’re at it, can’t committing these sorts of crimes also get you disbarred? If this is right, the whole thing gets even more confusing – he’s selectively, and arbitrarily, choosing on which grounds he’s going to get disbarred.

What annoys me most about the concluding conceit (that he, despite everything, has upheld attorney-client privilege) is that the movie practically revels in characters who act outside, or just nearly outside, the law. We’re able to indulge, early on in the movies, in the exploits and the lavish lifestyle of the law partners who are willing to “bend the rules without breaking them” (and again: here the Cruise character goes in for this, without really flinching). And then at the end, we cheer the FBI as it bends the rules (e.g., getting the bad brother out of jail) in order to achieve justice. Part of the appeal of the movie is that it allows us to enjoy this fantasy of lawlessness, of being above the law, in pursuit of either base or noble ends.

Perhaps I’m being too picky about this, because perhaps we’re meant to see the Tom Cruise character as a complex figure, trying his best to negotiate the line between being lawful and being lawless. This may be. Still, at the end, we’re led to believe that he retains his initial purity of fidelity to the law and to the legal profession, the “promise” that drew his wife to him “even before they met.” Now, if Cruise had said, “We got them, and I did it without violating the attorney-client privilege,” and then both he and his wife burst out laughing – now that would have been the better ending., I think.

- posted by Chad @ Monday, July 07, 2003