LINCOLN LAWYER

Lincoln Lawyer

Lincoln Lawyer

The Story

The Lincoln Lawyer is a thriller-courtroom drama directed by Brad Furman (The Take) and adapted from the best-selling 2005 novel by veteran crime writer Michael Connelly. The film follows the general framework of the original relatively closely. The story concerns a Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Haller (Matthew McConaughey), who conducts business from the Lincoln Town Car of the title. His usual clients are drug dealers, call girls, con artists and petty criminals of one kind or another. Haller operates in what himself describes, in Connelly's work, as “the gray areas.” He has no interest in the innocence or guilt of his clients. In fact, he asserts early on that there is no client as frightening as an innocent one, because if a lawyer fails to prevent such an individual from going to prison, it will scar the attorney for life. Summing up, Connelly writes in his novel: “The law was not about truth [for Haller]. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.”

An apparently lucrative case falls into Haller's lap. An immensely wealthy young man, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), stand accused of severely beating and threatening to rape a prostitute. Backed by his millionaire mother and her well-connected legal adviser, Roulet emphatically insists on his innocence and repudiates any plea bargain or possible agreement with the authorities. Haller and his investigator, Frank Levin (William H. Macy), set to work looking into the details of the violent incident. It will not be giving away too much to reveal that their inquiries soon indicate that Roulet is hardly the innocent he claims to be. The immediate case appears to be linked to a previous one in which Haller convinced his client, a young Latino, to plead guilty to murder and accept a life sentence to avoid the death penalty. In the end, Haller faces an apparently impossible dilemma. “I believed that I had one client,” explains the lawyer in the novel, “who was guilty of the murder another client was serving a life sentence for. I could not help one without hurting the other.” Both the book and film essentially hinge on Haller's efforts to solve that legal-ethical problem. (Box Office Mojo, 2011)

Furman's film version is also intelligently and competently put together, with adequate performances or better from McConaughey, Phillippe, Macy, Frances Fisher, Marisa Tomei, Josh Lucas, John Leguizamo and numerous others. Unhappily, Tomei, a charming performer, as the ex-wife (and a prosecutor), with the child that Haller has neglected up until now, has little to do. Once the history of the relationship is sketched out for us, we are intended to fill in all sorts of obligatory details ourselves, concerning Haller's perfidy, with the result that we actually know little about her or about the couple's marriage. Leguizamo too is playing a role, as the hyper-talkative, hustler bail bondsman that he could more or less perform in his sleep.

The Lincoln Lawyer wants to make even handed points at the expense of both defense lawyers and police-district ...