The Rainmaker may have been a gun-for-hire assignment Francis Ford Coppola did for the paycheck at the height of John Grisham movie mania and during the long financial fallout from his One From the Heart debt (necessitating, among other movies, The Godfather Part III, the Coda cut of which is a profound rumination on the desperate attempts of a once-good man who lost his soul to now exhume and resurrect whatever good remains in him — a great Catholic text); but it is also obvious from the opening title, the name of the film around whose emboldened letters a tiny shark sinuously swims, a needlessly intricate visual flourish, that this is still the work of an iconoclastic artist. The shot is redolent of an especially striking moment from Rumble Fish (Coppola’s audacious spiritual kin to his much more normal The Outsiders), a seemingly inconsequential decision pregnant with deeper meaning if you dig a little deeper: The Outsiders was the widely-appealing requisite for Coppola to make Rumble Fish, the great Italian-American’s most “experimental” (for lack of a better word) film at that time, a classic one-for-them, one-for-me. The Rainmaker is a normal crowd-pleaser, yes, a loyal adaptation of a big bestseller, but Coppola refuses to simply go through the motions. It’s just a shark, a predator of diminished size, trapped in a glass box, making little lazy loops around the title, but it’s so cool.
Rudy Baylor (young, skinny Matt Damon) has just graduated from college in Memphis, a city rife with lawyers, and, having no lucrative job lined up (which most of his more affluent — meaning born-affluent — peers have quickly secured), serves drinks at a bar. The bar owner, J. Lyman “Bruiser” Stone, an ambulance chaser played with vivacious amorality by Mickey Rourke (in his weird post-boxing period), hires Rudy as an associate. (It’s Bruiser’s pet shark that swims around the title.) Rudy is paired with Deck (a delightful Danny DeVito), who failed the bar six times, and doesn’t seem like such a bad guy, showing up at accident victims’ hospital rooms with business cards notwithstanding. Rudy, who has never actually tried a case before a jury, decides to represent a penurious but truly decent middle-aged couple, Dot and the not-fully-lucid Buddy (he has a plate in his head from Korea), whose 22-year-old son Donny Ray is dying of leukemia, and their insurance has denied him a procedure which could save his life. Perhaps a bit too genuine and altruistic to really beguile as much as Coppola’s best characters, Rudy is still sincerely charming, and, as played by Damon, the kind of person you want to see win, but who, in America, so often does not.
Rudy has trouble sleeping because he lies in bed worrying about the financial situations of little old ladies who are inveigled by religious conmen (in God we trust). He says to a woman in the hospital, having been severely beaten by her husband with a baseball bat, that her husband deserves to die. He comes to represent a certain purity still lingering faintly in some Americans, a bright young man who must choose between personal gain and doing what’s right. He is forced to work for a sleazo like Bruiser because the good guy lawyers, the heroes, starve, an indictment of the whole fugazi of the U.S. legal system. His opponent, representing the insurance company, is played by Jon Voight, who, here and then in Enemy of the State, really found a niche in playing evil men he probably believes are heroes. When you think of a wicked lawyer, you think of Jon Voight in this film. (Rudy literally tells us via voiceover that he hates these lawyers for “who they represent.”)
The film, as observed by David Thomson (avid fan of The Godfather but tough on Coppola because the filmmaker is, the critic opines, so talented and capable of better, that he must be held to a higher standard), is “thoroughly old-fashioned and entertaining.” It cost $40 million to make, the same as Coppola’s 1992 Dracula, a flamboyant, hallucinatory, gorgeously garish Gothic horror comedy, an unrelenting display of cinematic bravado with the kind of lascivious lunacy that one might expect from Roger Corman (who produced Coppola’s debut feature, Dementia 13) and barrels of blood. (Blood, after all, is life.) You compare the two films made for the same budget, but Dracula topped $200 million at the box office, while The Rainmaker made $45 million. The ineradicable imagery in Dracula is the stuff of nightmares and wet dreams, beautiful, phantasmagoric — Dracula and his flowing red robe crawling insect-like along the vast stone walls of his castle; a shadow slinking around unbeholden to its corporeal body; a pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves and his iconic accent being enveloped by naked women as their breasts rise majestically out of pristine white sheets; Coppola pulls off every kind of cinematic effect known to man in his macabre, sex-steeped vision of Bram Stoker’s novel, his De Palma film, maybe. The Rainmaker, by contrast, is perhaps Coppola’s least-flashy film to come post-’60s. Even the previous year’s Jack (which, despite being the most widely-hated of his films, is very entertaining) has moments of pizzazz and remains truly strange.
The Rainmaker is not strange; it boasts no bombast. Shot by John Toll (who also lensed Jack), one of the less-acclaimed of the many DPs with whom Coppola has worked, it’s handsome in that way mid-budget mainstream movies used to be, but possesses little of the indelibility of Gordon Willis’ or Vittorio Storaro’s work, or the delirious digital dreamscapes that Mihai Malaimare, Jr. brought to Coppola’s late-career films. This is not to say that it doesn’t look good — the beginning is a very Coppola series of pretty shots of a Memphis courthouse, all virtuous white pillars erected heaven-ward and the gables like arrows aimed at the God who made all men equal, dissolves and composite shots that end up resembling bars imprisoning Rudy in his first shot, as he tells us about his bibulous, lawyer-hating brute of a father. And in an early scene, Coppola uses the whole of the 2.35 frame to show a chasm between Rudy and Deck at a fancy restaurant, each trapped in the extreme edge of the frame, a vast crimson tablecloth separating them like a sea waiting to be parted, to capture the moment they realize that Bruiser is in legal trouble himself. Deck proposes that they team up, become partners, 50/50, “right down the middle.”
The film’s success as entertainment comes from its intelligence and empathy, and is exceptionally paced, with Coppola’s natural feel for rhythm. The roulette of great performers, in big and small roles (Danny Glover, Dean Stockwell, Roy Scheider, and Virginia Madsen all appear in roles that could have been written specifically for them), keeps us invested in the fairly unremarkable story. But The Rainmaker’s deeper power derives from Coppola’s lifelong interest in how individual men fit into the corrupt and corruptive systems which comprise this country. Think of Michael Corleone and his family and his “family,” and later his financial entanglement with the Vatican; Apocalypse Now’s various soldiers sent on a cryptic mission, puttering in an old boat up a river which winds through an inferno of green and leads ineluctably to the fabled, inscrutable Kurtz, a coterie of young men sacrificed by higher-ups trying to eliminate the one who went awry; alienated youth in boring, banal small-town America in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (how these boys fit into society, as well as into their own hermetic cadres and families); Gene Hackman’s paranoid soundman not playing well with other soundmen, or with anyone, really, in The Conversation; Val Kilmer’s miserable scribbler of bargain-bin horror aspiring for better as he ponders his role and reputation within the literary sphere in Twixt; a car genius operating on the periphery of the major automotive companies in Tucker; and the myriad characters who find themselves alone in foreign, hostile territory in Dracula, including the Count’s own indefinable place in history and time, his identity lost in the echoing eternity of love, and Reeves’ naive young man (a recrudescent Coppola character type) sent to eerie, dangerous Transylvania so he might get a promotion at work, only to soon be corrupted by the ludicrous lasciviousness of cartoonishly gorgeous women sipping on his blood and keeping him docile by systematically rubbing the insidious virginal pallor of their naked throbbing flesh all over him, while his fiance blushes over some rather tame 19th-century smut many long, long miles away.
In The Rainmaker, Rudy learns that he is, because of his character and earnestness, incongruous with the shakers and deal-makers of his vocation. And Coppola shows us how the jetsam of society, the ill and ill-treated, do not fit into the system which America pretends is rooted in justice. The Rainmaker makes private insurance corporations and the U.S. legal system look like vast conspiracies operating in the clear sunny open, invulnerable to the crusades of Boy Scouts with bleeding hearts. Even if Dot and Buddy win their case, they still lost their son. They won’t be the last. As William Gaddis famously opens A Frolic of His Own: “Justice? – You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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