In The Lincoln Lawyer, a courtroom drama based on the popular novel by Michael Connolly, Matthew McConaughey plays an LA defence attorney called Mick who seems to specialise in a kind of tidied-up and glamorous form of sleaze. I’m not talking about his clientele, which consists of bikers active in the drug trade, prostitutes and repeat offenders who are certainly guilty of all kinds of larcenous acts. It’s Mick himself who is set-up as the slick exponent of personal corruption. He’s a greedy guy who’s on the make and on the take. He performs his trade from the back seat of a Lincoln Continental, which is the kind of writer’s conceit that grants him a quotient of pop culture, old school 'cool’. He sports a good haircut and favours a black suit ensemble that makes him seem to me for reasons I can’t quite explain, a little reminiscent of Johnny Cash, but much taller (and with a white shirt). Mick talks a lot, and talks fast, in short punches of slang, lawyer-speak and street code. You don’t have to hear every word to get the point: He’s smart, he’s wise, he’s been around. Of course, what sells this impression with conviction is that everyone in the entire movie seems impressed by the guy, and a little scared about he might do with the law, which is his weapon of choice.
Mick is like the old Western hero we know from the movies: The Good Bad Man, the only kind of guy that can clean up a truly corrupt place (like say LA) because a goody-goody type has no chance. Looking like you’re smarter, seedier, and more corrupt than the next scuzzbag is good for business. (This kind of ironic hero is true of detective fiction too, like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.)
Still, all of these fine character details and nuances makes The Lincoln Lawyer seem like a character piece, a story bent on redeeming a guy whose moral compass is not quite pointing in the right direction. Mick certainly dominates the action, and McConaughey does a great job in impersonating this impossible sounding character so that he resembles something close to a human being, but in this kind of crime fiction, plot, intrigue, and twists trump moral angst every time.
The basic set up has been well rehearsed in courtroom TV drama. Essentially, it’s that Mick, the naughty lawyer who pretends to be bad, gets a client he has to defend but who deserves to be behind bars. The movie’s real bad-guy is Roulet (Ryan Phillipe), a rich 90210 hard case with a scary mother, played with eye-popping madness by Frances Fisher, who claims that he did not savagely beat up a prostitute. That said, how this fairly straightforward storyline evolves is tortuous and complicated and there’s no point in reliving it here except to guarantee that there is a lot of plot and murder. Surprises abound in the expected way; some of the characters here experience sudden reversals of fortune.
I have not read any Connelly but I’m told that what’s here is a faithful adaptation. One of the key style points of crime fiction is that, as a rule, authors rely on dialogue, not descriptive action, to drive the story. I can believe that screenwriter John Romano is true to the book. There are a lot of scenes where the cast, playing characters that resemble plot points rather than people, explain the action to each other. Though, to complain that the film feels programmed, artificial or untrue to the law or life seems beside the point; the kick here is watching how this mess of a story clicks into place. It’s the same kind of pleasure you get from resolving a puzzle. Trouble is, it’s not very interesting on any human way, nor is it much fun.
Even in a totally superficial way The Lincoln Lawyer feels jazzed up to go no where much. Director Brad Furman, cinematographer Lukas Ettlin and the designers create an abstract of LA of imposing freeways, over-lit dumpy courtrooms, cosy bungalows, and all night pick-up bars that swim with neon and bad vibes.
Furman and co. has elected to deploy a camera style that might best be described as active. The Lincoln Lawyer makes some of Oliver Stone’s early movies look sedate; there are beats here where the camera lurches into sudden zooms or whips about before alighting on a face to deliver a close-up of, say, McConaughey"¦ thinking. It’s an example of a director trying to pump up talky material with a style that does not aim to express anything other than the fear that it could get boring if things stop moving.
That said,, the acting, which is all about personality (as opposed to feeling), is fun to watch. Marisa Tomei stands out as Mick’s ex-wife, mostly because her sincerity and passion seems like it belongs in a much more serious film.
The Lincoln Lawyer is an old fashioned movie in the most conspicuous way, which is to say it’s not a movie about morality or any of that complicated squirmy stuff – it’s a movie about winning, and being right. It’s a feel-good movie about murder.
