For some odd reason, bigshot author John Grisham and the
honchos at Polygram all seemed to assume that Robert Altman, of all people,
would be delighted to turn in a formulaic Grisham legal drama in the hack-journeyman
manner of The Firm (1993) and The Client (1994), (directed by Sydney
Pollack and Joel Schumacher, respectively).
Instead, everything that’s great about The Gingerbread Man stems from Altman’s tampering and tweaking of
the property to make it more palatable to him.
It turns out he is the one who slashed the courtroom scenes to a mere
few minutes, moved the location to Georgia, and added the rapid advance of a
hurricane to the plot as not only a suspense tool but a means of underscoring
his frequent theme of humanity’s helplessness before the elements. The murky swamps and turbulent weather are so
key to the aesthetics and ambiance of the film, in fact, that they are
practically characters more distinct than the people who pass through
them. Beyond that, Altman’s
characteristically roving and zooming camera adds a cinematic rigor and
validity to the film that is missing in the majority of similar thrillers,
which tend to all look like they’ve been made by the same people. Kenneth Brannagh plays a southern lawyer who
happens to go home with a quirky food server (Embeth Davidtz) after a party and
ends up embroiled in her chaotic personal life, in particular her struggles
with her reclusive, half-sane father (Robert Duvall) who belongs to some kind
of hillbilly commune and seems to be terrorizing her. Altman’s practically ethnographic fascination
with human activity, from mundane to bizarre, puts off audiences accustomed to
being dragged through a film like a theme-park ride, but if you calm down and
relax into it, it becomes infinitely more rewarding. The
Gingerbread Man is irrelevant as a Grisham thriller, but an absorbing
success as an Altman film. It is also
the first of three consecutive Altman films – followed by Cookie’s Fortune (1999) and Dr.
T & the Women (2000) – that explore the milieu of the American south,
whose ways and dialects are frequently suppressed in mainstream media unless
used as fodder for condescending reality shows.
Altman instead seems to see a vanishing, intuitive and independent
culture worthy of commemoration.
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