When Mike first introduced me to the film The Devil's Advocate, I didn't realize that the movie was supposed to be a thriller. I sat there and watched the film grow more and more ridiculous. "I can't be that drunk," I thought to myself as Al Pacino's face started to glow red.
The premise? Wearing a tan suit, Keanu Reeves defends a rapist in his Southern hometown. He wins the trial and is recruited to a big, lavish law firm in New York where Al Pacino is the partner. Keanu is a fabulously wonderful defense attorney and is winning cases where the defendants are so very clearly guilty. Does he know the witness he puts on the stand is lying? No! But the audience does and therefore, Keanu the Lawyer is a dirty, evil man.
Chaos ensues as Keanu takes on the world. He stops paying attention to his wife, who commits suicide and dies a tragic, bloody, gruesome death. He turns into a bastard. Clearly, all criminal defense attorneys are assholes, so this is to be expected.
Near the end, we discover that Al Pacino is not just the partner of the law firm, but he's also Keanu's father. And you know who else he is? Lucifer himself. Can you believe it?? The devil is a lawyer! But why the law? Oh, the answer is clear: "Because the law, my boy, puts us into everything. It's the ultimate backstage pass. Did you know there are more students in law school than there are lawyers walking the earth?"
At the very end, we come to find that the entire the-Devil-is-a-lawyer thing was all a dream. Keanu never went to New York. He's still in the bathroom during a recess. He still has the rapist to defend. What does he do when he goes back into the courtroom? He withdraws from representation? Why? A crisis of conscience. Apparently rapists don't deserve to exercise their due process rights when their lawyers believe they're guilty.
This movie is like a story told to small children. "Watch this," parents tell their children. "If you become a lawyer, your spouse will die and you'll come to find that your father is the Devil. Become a lawyer, a become the Devil yourself."
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2 comments:
Watch the movie again.
You missed some important details in the end. (It wasn't a dream.)
The real point, if there was one, was something like the doing everything you can to escape the devil will lead your right into his arms, or something like that.
I prefer to think that the end showed that this was just a continuous story line where Keanu's character would keep starting over and over again until the devil finally won.
The devil comes back though, right at the end: the devil always get his man!
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