Movie Review: The Chamber (1996)(*** out of 5) - A movie that you expect to be a courtroom drama actually turns out to be the story of a family and its past, as young lawyer Adam Hall (Chris ODonnell) finds himself digging through several generations of family skeletons after he takes on the case of his grandfather Sam Cayhall (Gene Hackman), a racist scumbag found guilty years before of a Mississippi bombing that killed two Jewish children and now set to die in the gas chamber in less than a month unless Adam can find some way of commuting the death sentence. The clear highlight of the movie is Hackmans performance. He was believable in a movie in which hes definitely cast against type. He becomes the epitome of the racist scumbag hes portraying, and yet the characters nature is also softened by the writers, who introduce uncertainties about Cayhalls level of involvement in the bombing and who raise the possibility that he may be feeling remorse for what happened. Cayhall in the end even does something somewhat noble. His daughter (played by Faye Dunaway) - who witnessed him murder a black man in an incident years before - has been haunted with guilt, believing that if she had let him know that she was present, he would never have killed the man in front of her eyes. She feels guilty, believing that shes responsible for the mans death and finally asks her father as she visits before his execution whether he would have killed the man if he had known she was there. He says he would have. It sounds like a harsh and cold statement coming from Cayhall, and yet hes really telling her that it wasnt her fault and she shouldnt feel guilty over what happened. I found that simple scene very moving - mainly because it seemed to be a lie. His body language seemed to suggest that he wouldnt have killed the man with his daughter watching, but he wanted to take away her feelings of guilt. Perhaps, though, that also serves as the great weakness here - to me at least. Cayhall was a bad guy, but there seemed to be attempts to excuse him - especially with the repeated refrain that he had no choice but to become a hateful bigot. His father had been one, his fathers father, and his father as well. How could Cayhall have turned out differently after three generations of hate? The obvious response (which was strangely never voiced) is that Cayhalls son (Adams father, who had ultimately committed suicide, apparently out of shame from the familys past) turned out differently in spite of the four generations of hatred in the family before him. The whole idea that Cayhall was destined to be a racist because of his upbringing grated on me because of that. Still, Hackmans performance was great, and Cayhall was an interesting character. Chris ODonnell was overshadowed by Hackman in this. He was all right as Adam, but perhaps lacked a bit of spark that might have brought more life to the movie. The writers made a good decision in not developing a romance between Adam and Nora (Lela Rochon.) An inter-racial romance between the racists grandson and lawyer and the governors aide might have been an obvious direction to take, but it frankly would have been too obvious. The end result, though, was that Nora was a minor character. Her place in the story seemed ill-defined to me. Theres a hint of some deep, dark secrets from the past that could come back to haunt some of Mississippis political elite, but that never gets developed. Many criticize this because it apparently strays quite liberally from the John Grisham novel on which its based (which Ive never read I admit.) Well, this is a movie. Movies and books are different. You cant just take a novel and make it fit the screen, so adaptations dont bother me as long as the end result on film is good. This was a good movie, and I appreciated the fact that while Cayhalls character was softened over the course of it, there was no real redemption for the character. This is the films biggest issue... trying to care about the loathsome character that Gene Hackman so effectively brings to the screen. (Which I didnt.) He played his part in the childrens deaths, and he paid the price for it. Overall, this is pretty good.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 04:48:33 +0000
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