Friday, January 23, 1998
‘Gingerbread Man’ is sweetly sinister
FILM: Kenneth Branagh lurks about Savannah in Grisham’s latest
thriller
By Kristi Nakamura
Daily Bruin Contributor
Something sinister creeps through the drizzly gray Southern
streets, transforming a once innocent children’s rhyme into
something darkly foreboding.
"Run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the
gingerbread man."
"The Gingerbread Man," the first John Grisham thriller to hit
the big screen without being written as a novel first, stars
Kenneth Branagh as womanizer and successful attorney Rick Magruder
whose lust for the mysterious waitress Mallory Doss (Embeth
Davidtz) gets him into a dangerously sticky situation.
To compliment the ominous plot, the film was shot on location in
Savannah
"(Savannah) is very beautiful and it is sophisticated on a
certain level, but there’s a strange underbelly to the place,"
Davidtz says. "The place has a surprisingly dark element to it. It
probably has to do with its history and it helped (the film) out.
It definitely gave the film an edge."
The Southern setting is accompanied by another Grisham staple,
an intricate storyline. In Magruder’s attempt to protect Doss from
her threatening backwoods fundamentalist father, Dixon Doss (Robert
Duvall), Magruder finds his own children kidnapped. To complicate
things even further, the local police are unwilling to help
Magruder because of his recent successful defense of a criminal who
shot a cop.
Knowing that he cannot solve the mystery alone, Magruder enlists
the services of alcoholic private investigator Clyde Pell (Robert
Downey Jr.). While the two are supposed to be collaborating, at
times they undermine one another’s attempts.
"(Magruder and Clyde) are behaving like boys when they think
with that part of their anatomy and certainly everyone’s a rival
and (Magruder) chooses not to understand that Clyde has been going
out on a limb here to help him out," Branagh says. "All that kind
of stuff, I think, makes it nice and murky and it makes it much
harder to work out who did it and why they did it because you’re
drawn into these not necessarily conventional but human
dilemmas."
Magruder also recruits his beautiful, if hesitant, legal partner
Lois Harlan (Daryl Hannah) to assist himself and Clyde. Hannah is
nearly unrecognizable as a brunette in her first scene in "The
Gingerbread Man."
"(It’s) amazing what hair color can do," Hannah says. "People
think you’re smart all of a sudden."
However, the actress emphasizes that changing her hair color for
the role had nothing to do with people having a difficult time
seeing a blonde as a lawyer. Rather it was because director Robert
Altman wanted Magruder to be attracted to a certain type of
woman.
"A variation on the same theme, you know, so he’s drawn to these
girls with sort of dark short hair who are sort of tall," Hannah
says.
With the help of Clyde and Lois, Magruder must track down Doss
himself to save his children and discover the kidnapper’s true
motivations. In the end, nothing is as it seemed.
Adding to the tension, Altman uses an impending hurricane
looming in the background to bring about a powerfully timed climax
of both the storm and the plot.
"This is a movie about the people of Savannah, and every foot of
film in the picture was shot there," Altman says. "The city is laid
out like a Monopoly board, with its stately homes and trees with
moss hanging from them, and most of the film was shot at night,
with Savannah’s aura and atmosphere rubbing off on every element of
the picture."
Rather than bringing in extras or dayplayers to fill in the
smaller roles in "The Gingerbread Man," Altman fills in the gaps
with reality.
"All of the people who were in that scene where we’re sort of
strategizing with Kenneth’s character about how to get him out of
the predicament, all of those guys, that was Vernon Jordan, it was
the real Sonny Seiler, from ‘Midnight In The Garden Of Good And
Evil,’" Hannah explains. "All those guys were real lawyers and all
of the people at the party were real people from Savannah, real
lawyers."
Altman brings together fantasy and reality in such a subtle way
that it becomes difficult to discern where one leaves off and the
next begins.
"He’s always gone his own road and suffered for it and been
criticized for it and it’s something about that courage that’s also
in his work," Davidtz says of Altman. "I just think that Altman
never listened to the rules, never played by the rules. He’s made
his own way and I think that’s what’s made him, really."
FILM: "The Gingerbread Man" opens today.
Polygram Films
Kenneth Branagh (right) stars in "Gingerbread Man," based on
John Grisham’s novel.