Last night at 9 p.m. I put on the Sundance channel hoping to find Law and Order reruns. Instead I stumbled on a movie that was just starting, The Devil’s Advocate, which turned out to be a 1997 production from Warner Bros., Regency Enterprises and Kopelson Entertainment. It begins with Keanu Reeves playing Kevin Lomax, an attorney in Gainesville, Florida who’s won 64 consecutive cases. Right now he’s in the middle of the trial of Lloyd Gettys (Christopher Bauer), a male high-school teacher and coach who’s accused of molesting female students, and when the principal victim testifies Kevin is so shocked by what she’s saying about his client he asks for a 15-minute recess — only Johwhen he comes back he conducts a masterly cross-examination that reveals she’s hung out and played sex games with boys, and she and the coach’s other accusers compared notes in a sort of can-you-top-this game about who could come up with the most outrageous story about him. The jury acquits Gettys and Kevin receives an offer from a New York law firm to take a job with them as a consultant on how to pick juries. Just when I was thinking that after all the science-fiction films and period epics Keanu Reeves has done over the years I was finally getting the chance to see him play a normal human being in a contemporary story, he takes the job with the New York law firm and brings his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) with him.
He soon gets hired on as a full-fledged lawyer and for his first case he draws the defense of Phillipe Moyez (Delroy Lindo), who lives in an underground lair and is so disheveled he looks homeless. He’s been put on trial by the New York Health Department for killing a goat in his basement home, but Kevin wins his acquittal on the ground that he’s a voodoo practitioner and he was just exercising his First Amendment-guaranteed right to freely exercise his religion when he killed that goat. He moves up through the firm and arouses the jealousy of other associates, including the middle-aged Eddie Barzoon (Jeffrey Jones), with his rapid rise through the ranks, largely due to the sponsorship of the firm’s managing partner, John Milton (an oddly Anglo name for a character played by Al Pacino, who’s quite good in the role but I found his playing a bit too aggressive). The naming of this character after the author of Paradise Lost — a poetic retelling of the Book of Genesis from the point of view of Satan, who at the end of the book, after being exiled from God’s presence, utters the famous line, “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” — is our first clue as to what’s really going on at that law firm. The firm turns out to have business interests in various countries around the world, largely helping support dictators who not only rule brutally but are ripping off their countries blind and storing the proceeds in international havens — indeed, one of the key partners is Christabella Andreotti (Connie Nielsen in her first U.S. role), who babbles for long stretches in non-English languages that are not subtitled because the filmmakers, writers Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy (adapting a novel by Andrew Neiderman, whom I’d previously heard of only as the posthumous amanuensis of the late V. C. Andrews; he’s churned out a whole series of “Andrews” books since her death in 1997, and if The Devil’s Advocate is any indication, he was an appropriate choice by Andrews’ publishers to keep her name and style going even after her death) and director Taylor Hackford, deliberately wanted to keep us in the dark about who she is and what she’s doing.
The Lomaxes move into an expensive apartment (though the bathroom fixtures are still pretty tacky) and are mentored on how to paint and decorate it by their next-door neighbors, Leamon and Jackie Heath (Ruben Santiago-Hudson and future Law and Order: Special Victims Unit regular Tamara Tunie) — only a passing close-up of Jackie’s mouth reveals rotted teeth under her normal-looking ones. Kevin starts neglecting his wife in favor of his work, and she tries to fight back by redoing her hair (back in Florida she was a tousled-haired blonde; in New York, on the advice of the Heaths, she dyes her hair black and has it cut in the Louise Brooks bob) and getting new, more fashionable clothes. Midway through the story Kevin’s mom Alice (a nice turn by Judith Ivey) shows up in New York; a religious fanatic back home in Florida, she naturally denounces the Big Apple as a cesspool of sin and damnation and tries to get Kevin to leave it and go back home. She also raised Kevin as a single parent after his dad died before he was born — or at least she thinks that’s what happened. Kevin gets a huge case involving filthy-rich, thrice-married and totally unscrupulous New York real estate developer Alexander Cullen (Craig T. Nelson), who allegedly murdered his latest wife and two other members of his family one night (it seems like the writers were fusing O. J. Simpson and Donald Trump), and even though he knows she’s lying and therefore he’s suborning perjury, Kevin puts Cullen’s mistress Melissa Black (Laura Harrington) on the stand and she testifies that she and Cullen were having a long drawn-out sexual encounter during the murder. Cullen is acquitted, but the stresses of the case drive the final nails into Kevin’s relationship with his wife as well as her very sanity — in a series of scenes that might have been inspired by Vera Miles’ descent into madness in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Wrong Man, she ends up in a mental institution and ultimately commits suicide there.
Eventually the story becomes a sort of supernatural reworking of John Grisham’s The Firm — and its film version, in which Tom Cruise plays a young lawyer who joins a big firm and gradually realizes its principal business is representing the Mafia — in which John Milton turns out to be Satan himself and Kevin turns out to be his son (though the idea that Keanu Reeves could have resulted from the pairing of Al Pacino and Judith Ivey is pretty weird itself). The business of the two leads being father and son — like the title character in Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable, the lead of The Devil’s Advocate is the product of a union between the Devil and an ordinary mortal woman (a twist that, according to an imbd.com “Trivia” poster, wasn’t in Neiderman’s novel but was added by Lemkin and Gilroy), though she knew him only as a waiter in a New York hotel she stayed in during a week — and Milton wants the newly widowed Kevin to couple with Christabella, who’s also the devil’s child by a (different) mortal woman, and conceive the Antichrist. Instead Kevin shoots himself, which sets up a cataclysmic explosion that blows up the whole building where Milton had his home and his law firm. The Devil’s Advocate is an interesting movie, better when it’s just a fish-out-of-water story about a small-town Florida attorney trying to adjust to life and career in New York than when it’s throwing the devil stuff at us in the later reels and giving John Milton a soapbox from which to preach about the evils of the world (including saying that “Who in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine?” Politically and economically, he has a point, but the 20th century also produced a lot of really cool culture!) as if Robert A. Heinlein had suddenly developed an interest in the conflict of God and Satan.
It’s decently acted — though there’s a sort of harshness and angularity about Keanu Reeves’ appearance, especially his face, that makes it hard to believe in him as the (un)holy innocent the script tells us he is, while Theron gives us a lot more intensity than her rather underwritten character really needs. Indeed, the most moving performances come from some of the down-cast actors, particularly Jeffrey Jones and Craig T. Nelson, and the film also benefits from real locations and cameo appearances by then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and boxing proprietor Don King. Donald Trump is mentioned — there’s a big party scene which featured D’Amato and it’s explained that Trump would be there if business hadn’t called him out of town — and the room in which Kevin meets Cullen to plan his defense is actually Trump’s personal suite at Trump Tower (and yes, it’s as garish and ugly as its reputation). It’s possible Trump did film a cameo for this movie — reportedly he frequently insists that filmmakers wanting to shoot scenes at one of his property include him in the movie as part of the deal — and often his scenes hit the cutting-room floor. One time it didn’t was in the film Home Alone 2, in which Macaulay Culkin encounters Trump in the lobby of Trump Tower and asks him where the restroom is (and Trump tells him) — only the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) cut Trump’s scene in 2012 to shorten the film to fit a TV time slot, and Trump recently learned about this and tweeted that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had ordered the deletion because he doesn’t like Trump politically and has had harsh words for him at recent international conferences of world leaders.
