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The Chamber

1996, Movie, R, 113 mins

The Chamber: Review

The usual John Grisham legal hokum, tranformed by director James Foley into surprisingly grim and affecting stuff. Callow Chicago-based lawyer Adam Hall (Chris O'Donnell) is the grandson of unrepentant racist and anti-Semite Sam Cayhall (Gene Hackman), who -- after years of stays of execution -- is scheduled to die for his part in a 1967 Mississippi bombing that killed two small children. Hall goes back down South to handle his grandpa's final appeals, and in the process stirs up a hornet's nest of secrets long buried, but far from dead. If you've seen the sensationalistic A TIME TO KILL, this will feel deeply familiar: the Klan, racist conspiracies, an apparently open-and-shut capital murder case with unexpected depth, violence against children, a young lawyer in over his head. But rather than opting for sleazy theatrics, Foley turns the story inward and painstakingly evokes a landscape of lives stunted and warped by guilt, hatred and self-recrimination. Hackman gives an unsentimental performance as the hateful Cayhall, and Faye Dunaway is alarming as his alcoholic daughter. Proximity to Hackman occasionally drags weak-link O'Donnell into the vicinity of his betters.