Directed by Martin Campbell, who was also responsible for pitting yuppie lawyer Gary Oldman against psychopathic killer Kevin Bacon in CRIMINAL LAW, DEFENSELESS is surprising on a number of counts, and holds together far better than many bigger-budgeted features.
Lawyer T.K. Katwuller (Barbara Hershey) is ambitious, funny and smart. Nevertheless, her private life is a disaster and she's having an affair with a married client, Steven Seldes (J.T. Walsh). Seldes is accused of being involved in making pornographic films, and the vengeful father (George P.
Wilbur) of a young runaway girl who appears in adult movies is stalking everyone involved in his daughter's lamentable career. While shopping, T.K. runs into her college roommate, Ellie (Mary Beth Hurt), whom she hasn't seen in years. To her dismay, she discovers that Seldes is Ellie's husband.
T.K. and Seldes have a fight, and she storms out of his office. Later that evening he's murdered, and Ellie is the prime suspect. T.K. undertakes her defense, while desperately trying to conduct her own investigation. George Beutel (Sam Shepard), the cop assigned to the case, also investigates;
he begins to suspect T.K. is somehow involved. Ellie's trial is an ugly one--her husband proves to have been a pornographer who was molesting their daughter. She is acquitted, but T.K. realizes that in fact she was guilty, and teams up with Beutel to find the evidence that will prove it.
DEFENSELESS is a better than average thriller that manages to wring some interesting changes from familiar material. It's not without faults, chief among them that outrageously unlikely coincidence fuels a number of major plot turns. It's particularly hard to swallow T.K.'s accidental reunion
with Ellie, coupled with the revelation about Ellie's husband. The conceit that T.K. would actually find herself defending Ellie is also tough. But the characters are genuinely quirky--rather than cutely eccentric, as is the tendency in many films--and the performances bring them to life.
Hershey's T.K. is a woman whose ambitions have caught up with her, but she's not a movie-of-the-week neurotic; she's quite convincing and wholly sympathetic.
As Ellie, the college good girl turned suburban ice queen, Mary Beth Hurt is ferocious, a cotton candy doll spun from glass--her fiercely coiffed hair looks as though it could hurt you. Kellie Overbey, as Ellie's abused daughter, Jay O. Sanders as porno star Bull Dozer and Randy Brooks as T.K.'s
assistant Monroe all bring unexpected depth to their small roles. Sam Shepard does nothing original as Beutel, but his handsomely weathered presence is effective.
Much of the dialogue is undeniably clever, and such moments as Ellie's insistence that she knew T.K. was sleeping with her husband because T.K. wore a white dress (one which we saw her select after long deliberation) to their dinner party are memorably idiosyncratic. The situation in which T.K.
finds herself has a film noir feel; she's trapped by a series of ghastly and unlikely circumstances as surely as the doomed men at the center of such noir classics as DETOUR, OUT OF THE PAST and D.O.A., and everything she does simply traps her more thoroughly in the web. That she's a woman is a
touch that brings the story into the 90s without seeming forced.
Perhaps the most interesting narrative decisions involve the budding relationship between T.K. and Beutel. The romance is inevitable, but its path is surprisingly rocky, and there's no falsely ecstatic scene in which they fall into one another's waiting arms--they're both too prickly for such
cliched carryings-on. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment