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At a gangly two and a quarter hours, Devil's Advocate is without doubt history's longest and fanciest lawyer joke, albeit a grim and sometimes floridly lurid one. On the one hand a campy, awkward melange of Rosemary's Baby and The Firm, it is also the best lawyer film since Sidney Lumet's 1982 classic, and really incomparable, The Verdict, in which an ambulance-chasing drunk (Paul Newman) finds a quiet but full-blown redemption. If Devil's Advocate is any evidence, we have now concluded that lawyers are quite beyond hope, for in this film, well, the ultimate Bad Guy wins, and wins big.
In the real world, needless to say, that is not a cheerful prospect. What makes Devil's Advocate fun is the wit and ingenuity of its incisive portrait of evil, especially of the way evil accomplishes the destruction for which it yearns. Give Nathaniel Hawthorne a smile and a camera, put him in contemporary Manhattan, and you might get something like Devil's Advocate, only it would be a lot better.
The naive young man who runs, Hawthorne-style, into big-time evil is Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), a back-country Florida lawyer who has never lost a case either as prosecutor or defense attorney. His success lies in an uncanny ability to pick sympathetic juries and, fueling that, an egotism that wins at any cost, even to the point of exonerating ugly-guilty molesters.
A record like that attracts the attention of big-time New York law firms, and Lomax finds himself and his pretty wife whisked away, with seeming magic, to the Big Apple, on which he is more than eager to feed. Wooed and beguiled and successful, Lomax lands on the fast track as the protege of head-honcho John Milton (Al Pacino), who cavorts here, barely incognito, as Old Nick himself—wily, depraved, and bemused. Milton (the name is a feeble literary joke, alluding to the poet William Blake's contention that, in Paradise Lost, his great predecessor John Milton actually sided with Satan) spends a lot of time "in the air" or in New York's subway underground. Get it?
But Lomax doesn't get it. On first meeting, Milton invites Lomax to "walk with" him atop a skyscraping high-rise, a roof that seems the very fount of the world, and there Milton tempts him, body and soul, with Manhattan itself and, by extension, the whole of the world. Nor does the kid catch the clues in Milton's peculiar habits and capacities: unsleeping, ubiquitous, clairvoyant, predatory, omnilingual, and omnisexual. Clouding Lomax's sight, of course, is the fact that he soon gets the perks of a partner, and before he blinks, he is a partner. A fundamentalist kid from Florida should know better, even if he is on "parole" from his past.
The rub comes when Lomax's wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron), gets spooked, quite literally. The opulent veneer of the ultra-posh world in which they live cracks to expose within a sink of corruption and perversity, which the film rather relishes depicting. For one, the firm's pampered boutique-hopping wives prove to be very tony witches, having long ago joined Milton's minions. Before long, nightmares, infertility, and eventually Milton plague the young wife, and she slides from homesickness into terror and catatonia.
All the while husband Kevin fervidly pursues the defense of a rancid mega-developer accused of killing his own wife, stepchild, and maid. So oblivious is Kevin that even Milton counsels him to leave the case to tend to his disintegrating wife. Later, says the young barrister—after he wins this really big one. And then come the surprises.
The first of these is the full revelation of Milton as Satan. What impresses is not his cartoon loathsomeness, which he will finally repulsively exhibit, but his integrity and moral intelligence. The Devil is smart, fair-minded, honest, and patient, which is a lot more than he allows for God. In dealing with humankind, he does not so much overtake or possess people as entice them, providing the occasion for them to achieve what their darkest hearts really want.
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