"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

The Runaway Liberals

by Lee

When John Grisham’s book The Runaway Jury first came out in 1997 I read it in a day or two and liked it.  I then promptly forgot everything about it, except for the surprise twist at the end and the fact that I had liked the story.  So now that the movie version is out I decided to go and see it.

While the film itself is a resonably entertaining legal thriller, it is as much an anti-gun polemic as Bowling for Columbine.  Michael Moore could not direct a more anti-gun movie.  The story involves a wrongful death lawsuit against a firearm company filed by the widow of a victim of a workplace shooting.  That in and of itself is a reasonable premise for a movie.  What I found wholly distasteful was in the cartoonish character development. 

There is a scene where the heads of various firearms companies are sitting together in a room in a sort of secret conspiratorial cabal, all working together to circumvent the law.  They are paying millions to Gene Hackman’s character, a jury consultant, to buy a verdict.  This is the only way that anyone on the gun side of the suit is portrayed: evil, greedy, part of a grand conspiracy.  Conversely the plaintiff’s attorney, Dustin Hoffman, is portrayed as a fearless crusader, wholly uninterested in the verdict or the massive cash payoff that he will receive in the event of a victory.  Despite the long history of bloodsucking, soulless trial lawyers bankrupting for their own personal gain companies selling legal products (see cigarettes and silicon breast implants for two gross examples), the standard Hollywood line of “guns bad, anti-gun lawyers good” pervades the entire film. 

It’s a shame, because I definitely don’t remember getting the same vibe from the book.  Years ago I read the Randy Shilts book And the Band Played On, a frank account of the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.  While he spent considerable time pointing out how the Reagan government of the time did not give the epidemic the attention that, in hindsight, we know that it deserved, he also points a substantial part of the blame at the gay community itself.  When HBO made the film version it pointed almost all the blame directly at Reagan, and largely glossed over the gay community’s culpability in the situation.  This film takes much the same tactic, I think.  I didn’t get such an overt anti-gun vibe from the Grisham book, but I damn sure got it from this film.

Oh, and for those of you who read the book, you remember the huge twist at the end?  It’s not in the film.  I was stunned.

Update: A reader left a comment reminding me that the original book was about a tobacco lawsuit.  Checking the Amazon link above, I see that he is indeed correct.

Millions of dollars are at stake in a huge tobacco-company case in Biloxi, and the jury’s packed with people who have dirty little secrets. A mysterious young man takes subtle control of the jury as the defense watches helplessly, but they soon realize that he in turn is controlled by an even more mysterious young woman. Lives careen off course as they bend everyone in the case to their will.

No wonder I didn’t get an anti-gun vibe from the book, it had nothing to do with guns.  They changed the entire story.  Typical.

Update 2: Movie critic and unabashed leftie Roger Ebert provides proof of my claims above.

The widow has hired the traditional, decent Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman) to represent her, and the gun manufacturer is defended by a lawyer named Durwood Cable (Bruce Davison), who is the instrument of the evil, brilliant jury consultant Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman).

The anti-gun lawyer is traditional and decent, and the jury consultant representing the firearms industry is evil and brilliant.

Will the decent Wendell Rohr pay in order to win the verdict he believes his client deserves? Will the devious Durwood Cable add this expense to the massive Fitch operation?

Again, the anti-gun guy is “decent,” while the pro-gun guy is “devious.” These representations, which Ebert finds so appealing, are exactly why I hated the movie.  If such caricatures were being made of minorities Ebert would have panned the movie because of how cartoonish the portrayals were.

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