Just a reminder, we’re doing a screening of Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss tomorrow in Washington, DC. Details on how to RSVP are here. And we’ll head over to the second-floor bar at the Gallery Place Clyde’s to discuss the movie after the screening is over. Next week, we begin our conversation about women and the death penalty, and we’ll be watching and discussing Patty Jenkins’ Monster.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about John Grisham’s work is the extent to which he’s shifted from telling stories in which his main characters, who tend to be straight, white men, do the right thing when faced with criminality, to stories in which those same straight, white men end up joining social justice movements. Rev. Keith Schroeder’s journey in The Confession is identical to that taken by Michael Brock in The Street Lawyer: two men who believe they’re not directly influenced or threatened by injustice find themselves in the path of its unintended consequences, and come to believe that their sense of remove is unsustainable. There’s no question that these kinds of stories risk becoming The Help redux, tales about white saviors who rescue disadvantaged people from problems they’re unable to work their way out of. But in Grisham’s stories, his white boys tend to fail: an execution takes place, a homeless family freezes to death. The work these men end up doing is within movements, not at the head of them.

But it’s the things that bring them to consciousness that matter. Because while The Confession is far from Grisham’s best novel, it’s about a critically important problem: the profound need many people have to believe the criminal justice system works, and how it makes them violently resistant to the prospect that it errs, and that people can die as a result of those mistakes.
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Hot Coffee, Susan Saladoff’s documentary about the corporate fight to limit individual citizens’ access to the courts and to justice from the courts through caps on damages, influence on judicial elections, and clauses in contracts requiring that employees and consumers give up their rights to sue companies and arbitrate disputes, is a pretty good movie. Seeing Stella Liebeck’s burns from the McDonald’s coffee that injured her, or hearing Jamie Leigh Jones talk about being raped by her Halliburton colleagues is useful and powerful. The problem is, the lies about Liebeck’s case in particular are so ingrained in our culture — the documentary opens with scenes from Seinfeld of Kramer getting excited about suing somebody and Bart Simpson writing “I will not file frivolous lawsuits” on his classroom blackboard — that it’s hard to imagine how to push back this late in the fight.

An intriguing alternative presents itself in Hot Coffee, though, when John Grisham shows up to talk about his novel The Appeal. The book is inspired by the case of Oliver Diaz, a Mississippi judge who fought off an election challenge from a Chamber of Commerce-backed opponent, only to find himself the target of an ethics probe. (In the documentary, he insists it’s meaningless, though the relationships in question looked improper.) For a long time, Grisham was an incredibly powerful critic of corporate power. He was absolutely over the top, a melodramatist who wasn’t shy about alleging that companies would murder Supreme Court justices or rig juries to secure successful verdicts, and his novels don’t really have any ambivalence about whether his plaintiffs have been injured in a way that demands redress.

I don’t know if he got bored by telling similar stories, or if he just succumbed to the lure of CIA stories (his CIA director, Teddy Maynard, is a fairly boring manipulative genius), but I would love to see Grisham bring back his scrappy young lawyers and his flawed but appealing victims. And if I were Grisham or a liberal studio head, I’d be riding the wave of the downturn and the financial crisis and pushing to get every damn corporate malfeasance story I’d written but that hadn’t made it to the screen sold and adapted. Washington stories are hot at HBO, so sell The Street Lawyer to them as a miniseries or to a movie studio. Maybe convince someone to do The Appeal as a Wire-style Appalachia story about Massey Energy, and mining, and Don Blankenship. This is a great market opportunity for Grisham — if he can shift his audience’s attention in what happens to be a politically useful direction.

I had been skeptical of the idea of reintroducing Mitch McDeere, John Grisham’s Hero Lawyer from The Firm, as the main character in a television series. Grisham’s quite a plotter, even though his prose is pedestrian to the max and his characters are all pretty much the same person, but most of his narratives are movie-length, and I’m not sure how well they’d translate into the longer arc of a season without serious exposition—though I guess that’s what co-writers are for. Plus, I like the idea of Mitch and his wife Abby hanging out in the Caribbean, and maybe opening up a private detective agency they run off a boat or something (USA Network, call me! It’s the perfect idea for your Fairly Legal reboot!) But the more I’ve thought about it, and with the news that Josh Lucas is going to play McDeere, a role I think is perfect for him, I’m slowly coming around on the idea.

I think, though, it’ll be important for the show to figure out what role the FBI is going to play in it. My understanding is that the show catches up with McDeere 10 years later as he and his family leave witness protection, though it’s not clear if he’ll be doing what he explicitly didn’t want to do in the novel and testifying against his old colleagues at law practice that was a money-laundering operation for a Chicago mafia family.

Grisham’s perspective on the FBI is mixed. Hugely powerful and long-serving FBI director F. Denton Voyles is, to a certain extent, far more of a hero than any of Grisham’s blank men in beautiful suits. Voyles plays key roles in The Pelican Brief and The Client, as well as The Firm. As Jeffrey Jay Folks notes in his Southern Writers at Century’s End, Voyles puts Darby Shaw’s life in danger in The Pelican Brief, and in The Client and The Firm, he is ill-served, and in one case even betrayed, by incompetent subordinates. Grisham’s characters often end up outthinking the FBI agents who are supposed to help them but are ineffective at tradecraft or strategy. But Voyles is able to see the long game, and even if things don’t go as planned at every step in the process, he’s never utterly deluded or off-base.

He’s still human, though — Voyles is emotionally invested in cases, and he doesn’t think he’s God, unlike Teddy Maynard, the creeptastically manipulative CIA director who appears in a number of Grisham’s books. Grisham seems more comfortable with officials who have accumulated a lot of power in a domestic space, rather than a foreign one, which is interesting given how much he appears to believe the law is manipulatable, sometimes in the interests of justice and sometimes in direct contravention of it. I’ll be curious to see how much of that perspective makes it into the show. Grisham’s skepticism about the efficacy of the justice system and the people who work in it is a departure from much of what we see on network TV. It’s not always the most socially critical one (though he’s very hard on overcriminalization of homelessness in The Street Lawyer), but that skepticism is useful.