Am I too late to the party for Ally McBeal analysis?

I just watched 4 episodes of Ally McBeal last night. Here are some quick takes:

My take is that the show's appeal is that Ally is the unapproachable hot girl in high school and the show gives you a chance to live in her world.

This is reinforced by the fact that Ally acts like an adolescent: she has cutesy/girly mannerisms, she is pouty and has low self-esteem, she one of the most outwardly emotional people I’ve ever seen on screen or in real life, she escapes through fantasies, and she is overruled by her hormones. Although she tries to maintain that she is doing fine in life (she is) and that finding the right guy is just the last piece of the puzzle in her life goals, sometimes she’s overwhelmed with frustration.

What’s ironic is that this show is simultaneously really progressive in that Ally is highly capable, highly compassionate, and does very well in managing in what can only be described even by the standards of 20 years ago as a hostile work environment.

More than anything else, the show is just a really sexually charged one with really beautiful people on it (perhaps, Peter MacNichol won an Emmy because he’s not conventionally attractive and somehow managed to feel like he belonged). Nearly every time Ally meets a guy, I’m instantly put into will-they-or-won’t-they mode with guest star of the week. In one of the episodes I saw, a homeless guy derides her when she passes by (they do), in another episode, an obese man goes up against her in court (they don’t but he wants to), in another episode, a high school student is her client and she engineers a plan to boost his confidence by being his prom date. I was seriously wondering considering shows wouldn’t be cancelled back then for that, if she and the prom date would (thankfully they don’t).

Ally is a prime example of the Hollywood homely trope, wherein a star is so conventionally attractive that it's difficult to buy that her character wouldn't get dates. The in-universe excuse is that Ally is too busy to have anyone outside of fellow lawyers outside of her circle. That might make sense, but in the same way that Seinfeld feels dated because a number of their scenarios would have played out differently had the internet existed, I wonder if online dating might have cured her man problem. Ally's problem (from the sample that I saw) wasn't retainng or developing relationships. It was meeting guys. Sure, she would have had to sort out the losers from the winners from the hundreds of messages she would have received, BUT on the show she seemed willing to go out with losers because it was too much of a time investment to find the winners.

The Firm (1993)

 

During the early Spring dumping ground – the time between when the last of the great films has come out and the prestige films come in –it’s rarely a good bet to see a film during this time. The studio benefit from putting something new in the theater but don’t want to put their best material in the area.

So I watched a few films outside the realm of the current cycle, including this one.

John Grisham was the JK Rowling of the 90s: An unlikely author who published a book that caught on and created a literary empire.

As a child of the 1990s, many of the dramatic films I watched- A Time to Kill, Pelican Brief, The Client, and Rainmaker —were legal thrillers that were adapted from his books. Surprisingly, none of these films were over my head or inappropriate for me. 

I was a child when I watched The Client in 1994, but the story was told from the POV of a child so I could relate to it. I watched A Time to Kill in 9th grade so I was able to fully absorb its adult themes.  In this sense I grew up with him but strangely enough, I never saw The Firm. I’m not sure why, but this film appears to have the best reputation from various measures (awards buzz, polls I’ve seen of best 90s films, etc.).

Looking it up, I’ve discovered that A Time to Kill was technically Grisham’s first book (and he only got it published after 28 rejections), but it barely sold. It was his second novel, The Firm, which stood atop the New York Times best seller list for 40 weeks,  that put him on the map. The film rights to that film for $600,000 is what put him on the map.

Upon watching the film, it’s easiest to read it mostly as a Tom Cruise vehicle. Like Top Gun or Cocktail, Cruise as drawn as—well, for lack of a better word, Tom Cruise. He sticks out as the most gifted of his peers, he has an intense gaze, he has a fierce independent streak, he’s drawn to monogamy, and he loves to sprint in formal wear.

Tom Cruise films traditionally revolve around one key relationship (in every case that I know of, a male, maybe Eyes Wide Shut is an exception?) in which Cruise’s narrative arc goes from being cocky to learning humility. Films like Rain Man, Top Gun, or Jerry Maguire pair the Tom Cruise persona with a morality pet – a dumb jock, a simpleton rizzo, or a mentally deficient half-brother – that humbles him in learning not to look down on other people. The other type of foil to the Tom Cruise persona is the person who’s even cockier than Cruise himself and earns his respect that way: Paul Newman in Color of Money, Ken Wattanabe in The Last Samurai, and Gene Hackman in the Firm. Hackman even manages to seduce Cruise’s wife (Jean Tripplehorn, I’d be curious to know the etymology of that name). Considering how attractive Hackman is compared to Cruise (not very), that’s swagger!

The twist here is that Tom Cruise’s mentor is not what he seems to be. In a sense, this is the nakedest Tom Cruise has ever been. While he has a fierce independent streak, he rarely is complete without a mentor or sidekick, as I’m discovering while writing this essay.

Beyond Gene Hackman, this is a cast of heavy hitters that would set the template for future John Grisham novels. Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Margo Martindale,  and Wilford Brimley (a mainstay in commercials for Quaker Oats and later Diabetes, but he was also in at least a few good films). Holly Hunter got nominated for an Oscar for this film in the supporting category but I can’t remember her, which is either a sign that the Academy must have owed her for a past snub or it was just that packed a cast.

The odd thing about the film that would put Grisham on the map as the king of the legal thriller genre, is that this isn’t a film with a tremendous amount of court scenes. It devolves into a movie about corruption and personal accountability.

Fortunately, the film made enough money—it was the third highest grossing film of 1993 – to ensure some of the better films in the Grisham repertoire that would mark much of my childhood.