Wrong Arm of The Law

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: THE FIRM

DIRECTOR: SYDNEY POLLACK

WRITERS: DAVID RABE, ROBERT TOWNE, DAVID RAYFIEL

THE BOTTOM LINE: Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end.

Adapting a best seller for the movies is like carving flesh down to bone. You keep the skeleton, then apply rouge and silicone until the creature looks human. Any screenwriter adapting the 500-page novel The Firm, John Grisham's tort thriller about tax attorneys fronting for the Mafia, would try to streamline the story, infuse action into a narrative that is mostly lawyers chatting, give an emotional history to characters who are basically plot props and . . . please, a new ending. Grisham spun a lovely yarn -- the venality, the conspiracy, the flypaper guilt -- then let it unravel at the denouement. His climax had the hero in a Florida motel waiting for a FedEx package!

The Firm was one of those "it-kept-me-up-all-night" page turners for which there is no equivalent in movie hype. "I sat all the way through it" just doesn't have the same zing. But that is what to expect from the film of The Firm, which clocks in at 2 1/2 hours -- barely shorter than the audiocassette version of the novel. It's more bustle than brio.

The movie begins sharply, laying out the panoply of privilege: the sleek cars, the comfortable faces (Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook). It's like going on a shopping spree at Neiman Marcus and then getting whacked with the bill: here is the middle class's Faustian bargain of big money and sapping compromise, of anxious wives and Stepford lives. How handsome the paneling on a lawyer's desk -- as handsome as the paneling on a lawyer's casket. At Bendini, Lambert & Locke, death is the penalty for abusing the rule of confidentiality. Harvard Law whiz Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) will break that rule and many others honored by his firm, the Mob, the FBI and his resilient wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

So far, so good. Cruise, like Robert Redford two decades ago, is a Hollywood hunk who has played it smart by playing smart guys: young men with cute brain waves who can make intelligence and idealism sexy. He and the pricey cast (Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Wilford Brimley) make the machinery purr. The writers have corrected the book's dangling threat -- how to confront and cleverly resolve Mitch's brief disloyalty to Abby -- and its stodgy ending. The movie's moral is that however corrupt the Mob is, these lawyers are worse. Better for Mitch to cut a deal with a don than to let the firm stay in business.

Too often though, Sydney Pollack, whose swank and care energized the Redford thriller Three Days of the Condor in 1975, surrenders to genre goofiness, setting up bad guys who are omnipotent at the start and impotent at the end. Like a complex lawsuit, the movie gets buried in paperwork; there's too much walking and talking. (See Tom think. See Tom brood. See Tom make photocopies. See Tom amble across his living room -- in slow motion.) And at the end, too much running and gunning. Maybe every thriller demands a chase, but a clever thriller deserves a better one. On that endless, aimless run, Mitch loses his way, and The Firm goes flabby.