Where to begin with John Grisham on screen

John Grisham had two careers before becoming one of the best-selling novelists in American history – first as a trial lawyer, and then as a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives. His intimate knowledge of the law and of the South helped power his remarkable writing career, which began in 1989 with A Time to Kill. There have been nearly 50 bestsellers since then, between them shifting over 300 million copies. 

An ear ever to the ground for a literary phenomenon, Hollywood came-a-calling soon after the publication of his first hit. Between 1993 and 2004  there were nine cinematic adaptations of his work (and he wrote one original screenplay), many of which were as hugely popular as the books that had spawned them. With their sharp, twisty plots and extraordinary casts, the popularity of Grisham adaptations proved the main engine behind the 1990s love affair with legal thrillers.  

For a while, it seemed the cinematic dominance of Grisham would continue on as relentlessly as his literary one. Midway through that period, however, the box office takings started to decline precipitously. While he has continued to release a novel almost every year since that 1990s boom, to date, the last feature adaptation of his work was 2004’s Christmas with the Kranks (which was not even a legal thriller). Several further projects were announced in the intervening years, but none made it out of development hell. By the mid-2000s, the law had generally started to become more the purview of small screen shows than big screen movies (though 2007’s Michael Clayton proved a notable exception).  

Yet with the critical acclaim of last year’s Juror #2, and the recent news that Tom Holland is set to star in an adaptation of Grisham’s The Partner, who knows? Perhaps a renaissance is due.   

Tom Cruise plays Mitch McDeere, a hotshot straight out of Harvard Law School who finds himself working at a Memphis firm that is hiding a dangerous secret – and when its lawyers discover it, they tend to end up dead. He must find a way to extricate himself and his wife (Jeanne Tripplehorn) from the firm safely, while also appeasing the hovering FBI.  

As well as being the first Grisham adaptation, The Firm (1993) is both the longest (two hours 34 minutes) and the most satisfying. It contains all that would become beloved about the movies based around his work: a tremendous cast (Cruise, Tripplehorn, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, Holly Hunter, David Strathairn, Gary Busey); a meaty, conspiracy-laden narrative; an evocative depiction of ‘The New South’; and a raft of tense set pieces – Cruise would have more than one opportunity to practice his run! It is undeniably a popcorn movie, but an intelligent one, carefully crafted by a late-career Sydney Pollack well accustomed to handling both lengthy runtimes and star vehicles.   

Reviews were middling, but the film picked up a couple of Oscar nominations (including one for Holly Hunter, who had less than six minutes of screen time), and was a roaring success at the box office. The Firm laid the groundwork for Grisham’s cinematic supremacy.  

Grisham adaptations have always drawn as many starry directors as they have casts. On The Pelican Brief (1993), which hit cinemas six months after The Firm, Alan J. Pakula used the conspiracy thriller prowess he’d honed on masterpieces such as Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976) to further elevate the tense tale of a law student (Julia Roberts) who discovers a seditious plot behind the murders of two Supreme Court justices. Though the movie takes a little too long to get them both on screen together, Roberts and Denzel Washington – playing a journalist who proves to be one of the few people she can trust – make a formidable team. 

A gentler take on the Grisham formula, The Client (1994) sees Susan Sarandon as lawyer Reggie Love, who’s hired to protect 11-year-old Mark (Brad Renfro) from both the Mafia and the FBI after he stumbles on to some dangerous information. Less interested in plot machinations than in the warm relationship between Reggie and Mark, The Client still ducks the potential for schmaltziness and winds up genuinely moving – and there are few greater pleasures in the entirety of Grisham’s cinematic oeuvre than the sequence where Sarandon and rival lawyer Tommy Lee Jones are battling it out in court in front of judge Ossie Davis.  

At the other end of the spectrum, 1996’s A Time to Kill stars Matthew McConaughey as Jake Brigance, hired to defend Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson) after he kills the racists who raped his 10-year-old daughter (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly). While it was a big hit, many had justifiable concerns about the movie’s unabashed espousal of vigilante justice. Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, A Time to Kill is gripping and powerfully performed; notably, it was the film to propel a then perpetually second-string McConaughey to movie stardom.  

Recognising his box office allure, Universal Pictures bought the rights to Grisham’s fifth novel, The Chamber, before he’d even written it. That turned out to be a terrible mistake.  

Released just a few months after A Time to Kill, and also centred around a resurgence of the KKK, The Chamber (1996) saw young lawyer Adam Hall (Chris O’Donnell) try to save his Klansman grandfather (Gene Hackman) from the gas chamber. Asking audiences to root for an unrepentant racist was already a tough ask, but adding in a tensionless screenplay and Chris O’Donnell’s affectless lead performance truly doomed it. The Chamber was the first Grisham adaptation to flounder financially – the author himself was vocally displeased with the end result, calling it “a trainwreck”.  

Two years later, a discarded Grisham manuscript became the similarly unfortunate The Gingerbread Man (1998). It starred Kenneth Branagh as a Savannah lawyer whose one-night-stand with a mysterious stranger (Embeth Davidtz) embroils him in a case involving cults and murder. Wildly miscast and mauled by the studio – so much so that director Robert Altman tried to get his name removed – it plays out like a bad Grisham parody.