The Advocate Reviews

Set in 15th-century France, THE ADVOCATE is predicated on the notion that lawyers, businessmen, zealots, and ordinary people caught in the middle of things have always been essentially the same; and although the film is full of quaint goings-on, the problems it poses are immediately familiar to modern audiences. Parisian lawyer Richard Courtois (Colin Firth), weary of the petty intrigues, back-room deals, and entrenched hypocrisy of city life, moves to the small town of Abbeville, where he hopes to rediscover his faith in the law by working for simple country people, arbitrating their modest disputes and luxuriating in the pleasures of rural life: fresh air, plain food, and natural beauty. Instead, he finds the court docket bristling with cases of rape, murder, sexual misconduct, and witchcraft. At first, the murder of a Jewish child seems sadly straightforward: several witnesses saw the perpetrator running from the scene of the crime and are prepared to swear to what they saw in court. The hitch is that the evildoer is a large black pig owned by a group of gypsies camped at the town's edge. Courtois is reluctant to get involved in the case; though aware that animals have been tried in courts of law, there have been no such proceedings in Paris for years. Courtois becomes the pig's reluctant advocate when he realizes there's more to the case than there first seemed, and he's spurred in his investigation in equal parts by his growing feelings for Samira (Amina Annabi), a seductive gypsy, and his indignation at being played for a fool. The bones of a second child are unearthed, and Courtois begins to suspect that the Seigneur Jehan d'Auferre (Nicol Williamson), a wealthy merchant who's made him a lucrative offer to act as his personal counsel--and seems curiously adamant about condemning the pig--may be deeply involved in the matter. Courtois cuts through obfuscation and deception in his search for the truth, uncovering a cabal of Freemasons, dodging the advances of d'Auferre's stupid but luscious daughter, and encountering local prejudice against Jews and gypsies alike. He brings his investigation to a dramatic courtroom climax hinging on the location of a distinctive white marking on the pig. He also solves the mystery, though he doesn't get to make his success public. The killer is d'Auferre's son, who suffers some mysterious perversion of his nature that makes him murder without reason, and d'Auferre uses his rank to spirit the young killer away, promising that he won't be allowed to do any further harm. Writer/director Leslie Megahey is less interested in impressing the audience with the alien spectacle of medieval life than in Courtois and his travails, which range from conniving contractors and a complicated love life to professional corruption and influence peddling. Megahey enmeshes Courtois in a puzzle with all the right elements: murder, an official cover-up, conspiracy, class privilege and racial prejudice, cultural ignorance and suspicion of outsiders, and, at the end, the venerable conflict between justice and the letter of the law. But the real show is a series of sharp and complex characterizations. Country lawyer Maitre Pincheon (Donald Pleasence), who often outfoxes Courtois in court, reveals a sad weariness born of too many years adjudicating too many sordid squabbles. Mathieu (Jim Carter), Courtois' dour legal clerk, proves more keen than his employer and is well on his way to unraveling Abbeville's complex tangle of political, religious, and social relationships before Courtois has even thought to look beyond the bucolic surface. Educated Father Albertus (Ian Holm) privately entertains shockingly modern ideas about religion--he contends, for example, that witches who confess to having flown on broomsticks must only have imagined that they did so--while defending its most ludicrous tenets in public, most memorably the possibility that flies may be possessed by the Devil. D'Auferre, lord and master of the region because he bought a castle and the title came with it, tempers the excesses of his class with common sense; he confesses that local rumor is true--he did once hunt humans when game was scarce--but he didn't kill anyone, and the prey were well compensated for their bumps and bruises. Megahey successfully creates a convincing sense of an utterly alien time and place, while peopling it with characters who, for all the odd clothes and peculiar beliefs, are recognizably like us: ignoramuses and naifs, connivers and reasonable citizens, all trying to make sense of an often incomprehensible world. (Nudity, sexual situations.)