Top 100 Movies Of The 1990's: #58 The Rainmaker
Box Office: $46.0 Million
Oscar Nominations: None
Oscar Wins: None
MovieRankings.Net: 80/100
Available To Stream: Amazon Prime ($4)
I've always been interested in what I call "bridge events". These are movies or years when you have someone on the rise interacting with someone on the tail end of whatever they were great at. The best example of this is the 1951 New York Yankees. It was Mickey Mantle's rookie season and Joe DiMaggio's last. They only played that one season together and while the Yankees did win the championship, it had profound effects. In the World Series, DiMaggio was still playing center field and took his time calling Mantle off a fly ball that was hit near him. Whether you believe DiMaggio did it on purpose to show the young Mantle up or if DiMaggio just didn't see the ball clearly until it was close to him, it had disastrous effects. Mantle had to stop short when DiMaggio called for the ball at the last second and stepped in a drain pipe. Mantle wound up injuring his knee and it plagued him the rest of his career.
The Rainmaker is a bridge movie. It's the last good movie Francis Ford Coppola would direct and it's the first movie Matt Damon starred in. In fact, it was this movie that got Good Will Hunting made. Studios didn't want to fund GWH but when they realized the lead actor was the same guy who was starring in the new Coppola movie, it immediately got green lit.
It's the second (and last) John Grisham novel turned into a movie on this list. The Firm (#60) made more money and had a great cast with Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman but The Rainmaker is no slouch either. Not only do you have Matt Damon but it also has Danny DeVito, Jon Voight, Claire Danes, Danny Glover and Mickey Rourke in it. The book has more time and space and allows you to know these side characters much more but I have to give Coppola a lot of credit. This is my favorite Grisham book (by far) and Coppola does give many of the side characters enough space to care about them.
Some things don't work as well (the Claire Danes abusive husband plot line just gets in the way) but the Great Benefit/Rudy Baylor courtroom showdowns are fantastic. Some of the characters might be too good or evil but the heartbeat of the movie is in DeVito's performance. He plays an ambulance chasing lawyer who may be greedy but is also fair.
This is far from a perfect movie. The characters all work because the acting is so good but some plot lines are a little excessive. I am guessing Coppola loved the book so much, he didn't want to cut anything. I am assuming most of you haven't seen it. I feel like it's one of those movies that has fallen through the cracks even though it has Damon as the main character. It really is worth seeing. There are worse ways to spend a night seeing a movie that has Matt Damon and Danny DeVito fighting an evil insurance company.
58. The Rainmaker
59. Go
60. The Firm
61. Magnolia
62. The Talented Mr. Ripley
63. Tommy Boy
64. The Usual Suspects
65. In The Line Of Fire
66. My Cousin Vinny
67. Awakenings
68. JFK
69. Toy Story
70. Home Alone
71. Jerry Maguire
72. Titanic
73. Billy Madison
74. Apollo 13
75. Braveheart
76. Edward Scissorhands
77. Cape Fear
78. The River Wild
79. What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
80. 12 Monkeys
81. Stir Of Echoes
82. Mission: Impossible
83. Total Recall
84. Quiz Show
85. For Love Of The Game
86. Being John Malkovich
87. Men In Black
88. Scream
89. Alive
90. Three Kings
91. Glengarry Glen Ross
92. Die Hard With A Vengeance
93. The Blair Witch Project
94. Twister
95. Dirty Work
96. Election
97. Tremors
98. Any Given Sunday
99. The Wedding Singer
100. Clerks