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The Rainmaker (1997)
“I like to spend my days in court,” Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon), a straight-arrow, aw-shucks lawyer, tells another character in the John Grisham adaptation
The Rainmaker. He’s not exactly lying Rudy does his best not to lie, despite or maybe because of his awareness of how his profession is regarded but it’s a somewhat misleading self-characterization nonetheless. Rudy has just graduated from law school, has yet to pass the bar exam, and is barely scraping by as a sketchy employee of an ambulance-chasing firm run by Bruiser Stone (Mickey Rourke).
The Rainmaker eventually follows Rudy’s first court case, a major civil suit against a scammy insurance company that repeatedly denied the claim of a policy-holder suffering from cancer. But writer-director Francis Ford Coppola takes his time to get there. This is a courtroom drama that doesn’t skimp on the pre-trial depositions and judge-chamber meetings; it’s 45 minutes into the movie bef