Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #108 The Rainmaker (1997)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor or early aughts animated television program. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen along with an exploration of the cult animated series Batman  Beyond. 

Alternately, you can take issue with the way I executed a previous theme month and pay me to write about the movies you think I should have covered. 

That’s what one kind soul and veteran patron did with me and Danny DeVito month. He was unhappy with my choices and offered me cold hard cash to write about four movies he felt I should have covered in Ruthless People, Heist, The Rainmaker and Hoffa. I previously covered Ruthless People and Heist and now I am moving onto 1997’s The Rainmaker, Francis Ford Coppola’s contribution to the John Grisham cinematic canon.

The IMDB trivia section for The Rainmaker offers a wonderfully, suitable banal origin story for this most acceptable of earnest legal dramas: “Curious to understand the appeal of John Grisham's work, Francis Ford Coppola picked up a copy of the book at the airport. He ended up finishing it on the flight, impressed with its ability to hold his attention so thoroughly. He decided to make the film adaptation of the book his next project.”

At the risk of giving Coppola the faintest of praise, he truly made the cinematic equivalent of a best-selling paperback businessmen read on flights to pass the time. A grand auteur who once set about making the greatest, most important and ambitious movies of all time had reached a point in his career where he was seemingly more than willing to settle for creating a handsomely mounted piece of entertainment designed to be forgotten even as it is being consumed. 

A towering cultural giant who once aspired to do nothing less than change the way films were made, and with it the entire industry, through his insanely ambitious Zoetrope project ended the studio portion of his extraordinary career with a cornball, cookie cutter legal thriller about a handsome young legal David who takes on a sneering, evil corporate Goliath and triumphs. 

A man who once epitomized the outsized passion and romance of New Hollywood and its idiosyncratic auteurs was seemingly content to serve John Grisham’s vision. It’s John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, after all, not Francis Ford Coppola’s. 

The film was being sold on the name and reputation of one of the best-selling novelists alive, not the dude who made The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now. 

The Rainmaker accordingly feels more than a little like Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy in that you can feel how roaringly, ragingly superior the great artist behind the camera feels towards the lowbrow populist fare they’re adapting in every frame. 

Beatty and Coppola tried to elevate the comic strip crime-stopper and earnest legal drama through their artistry and succeeded in large part, albeit in a manner that nevertheless betrays a distinct contempt at being reduced to making a formulaic, wildly commercial movie for a mass audience of mouth-breathers and rubes. 

I live in Atlanta but have been lucky to take occasional group vacations to my wife’s family in places like Savannah, Tybee Island and Johns County, South Carolina. I live in the South but when I go on vacation I feel like I venture into the SUPER South, where the Southernness is much more pronounced, almost to a cartoonish level. 

The Rainmaker is set largely in the city of Memphis, yet it nevertheless seems to take place in the SUPER South, where the Southernness is amped up to 120 percent at all times and you can easily get blinded by the sheer excess of local color.

This begins with giving star Matt Damon a honey-dripping drawl so distractingly similar to the seductive Southern purr of Matthew McConaughey that I found myself wondering why they didn’t just cast an actual Southerner like McConaughey in the role since being Southern constitutes half the character’s personality. Being a lawyer makes up one quarter of his Grishamy essence while being a living Saint is the final piece of the puzzle. 

Damon is one hundred percent adequate as Rudy Baylor, an earnest, passionate and ambitious young man who grew up watching his lawyer-hating daddy beat up his mom during a hardscrabble, hard-luck childhood and grew up to be an idealistic lawyer with a special hatred of domestic abusers. 

I like to imagine that everyone who isn’t evil or insane is against wife-beating. But Coppola’s Apocalypse Now co-writer Michael Herr’s insultingly on the nose narration explicitly spells out that the reason Rudy gets very angry at Cliff Riker (an absurdly miscast Andrew Shue) for beating wife Kelly (Claire Danes) is because he grew up with domestic abuse and consequently has an extremely negative attitude towards it. 

It’s as if Coppola told Herr that he was making, solely for the money, a movie utterly devoid of subtext or moral complexity, and he wanted narration that further beat audiences over the head relentlessly with the movie’s heavy-handed themes of good versus evil. 

Desperate to get a foothold in the world of law and utterly lacking family connections, Rudy gets involved with a crew of shady, bargain-basement ambulance-chasers led by J. Lyman "Bruiser" Stone (Mickey Rourke), a degenerate who operates partially out of a strip club he owns and is perpetually in trouble with the law. 

While working for Bruiser, Rudy forms an odd couple partnership with another outsider angling for his big break in Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), a slippery, savvy bottom-feeder and unapologetic ambulance chaser who graduated from law school ages ago but never passed the bar despite repeated attempts. 

The role of Deck plays smartly to DeVito’s strengths. He’s a strangely lovable scumbag in the precarious position of practicing law without a license. He and Damon make for an inspired team; DeVito’s infectious sleaziness undercuts Damon’s bland nobility.

The rookie lawyer stumbles upon the case of a lifetime in the family of Donny Ray (Johnny Whitworth), a young man dying of Leukemia whose life could have been saved by a bone marrow transplant had evil insurance company Great Benefit not rejected their claim while literally adding insult to injury by calling the mother of the man dying unnecessarily of Leukemia stupid no less than four times for wanting them to help save her angelic son’s life. 

Donny Ray is so pure and so close to death that he damn near has angel wings even before shedding his mortal coil. The Rainmaker is as devoid of moral ambiguity as a Tyler Perry melodrama: in Coppola’s hammy morality tale, the good guys are white nights with pure hearts and clean souls while the bad guys are damn near Satanic in their evil. 

Jon Voight plays the most villainous of the movie’s many comically evil villains, hotshot Great Benefit lawyer Leo F. Drummond. Voight must have sensed at the time that it would not be long until his personality and outspoken far right wing political beliefs would cause pretty much every decent human being to look at his stupid fucking face or read his idiotic tweets and think, “Jesus, what an asshole!” so he pivoted to playing bad guys. 

Voight became a villain onscreen as well as in real life. He was able to make our hatred of him and his terrible personality work for movies like this, Anaconda, Super-Babies: Baby Geniuses 2 and Bratz: The Movie. 

Damon’s plucky underdog faces off against an impossibly powerful, sinister insurance company and its battery of high-powered, expensive lawyers in court while at the same time gently wooing Kelly, a good woman who has been dealt an impossibly tough hand in life. 

Thanks to the handsome cinematography of the great John Toll (Thin Red Line, Almost Famous), The Rainmaker looks terrific and is uniformly well-acted by a cast full of ringers but at 135 minutes it’s impossibly bloated. 

The Rainmaker is fine. It’s perfectly fine but by the end my primary feeling was that Francis Ford Coppola owes me forty minutes of my life back. There’s ZERO reason this needs to be longer than 95 minutes. He’s not making The Godfather Part 4. He’s making a handsome lawyer movie that’s a good half hour longer than it has any right to be. 

The Rainmaker ends as it must, with the good guys beating the bad guys against impossible odds on behalf of the most vulnerable and deserving of clients. Yet it proves to be something of a Pyrrhic victory, since the judgment against Great Benefit is so huge that it puts the company out of business, in the process preventing it from being able to pay Rudy’s clients. 

It should be a moment of profound, powerful, painful irony. The plucky rookie lawyer with a heart of gold won so big that the consequences look an awful lot like losing. Yet for a movie feverishly devoted to unapologetic, unashamed melodrama this final twist feels weirdly anti-climactic.

After shamelessly manipulating our emotions for one hundred and thirty minutes, The Rainmaker ends with a shrug and a defeated cry of “Eh, what can you do? The world’s a pretty messed up place.” 

Then again who can blame Coppola for feeling exhausted or defeated by this kind of money gig? It’s not quite as bad or as nakedly mercenary as Jack but the gulf between The Rainmaker and Coppola’s 1970s prime is impossibly vast. 

With The Rainmaker, Coppola succeeded in making a perfectly serviceable John Grisham movie that hits all the expected beats with polish and professionalism you would expect from a filmmaker of Coppola’s caliber, which nevertheless represents an unmistakable defeat from a filmmaker who generally aspires to so much more than bland, handsome competency.

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Buy the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL with dozens more illustrations and a new cover as well as over a hundred pages of new material covering every facet of Al’s career, including The Complete Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour for just $23.00, signed copy . tax + USA domestic shipping included here