Dir. Mark Frost
1992
A steamy belch of bayou gas, Mark Frost’s Storyville features senators behaving badly, lawyers acting erratically, and judges packing heat. A story this silly could only come out of the fevered dream of New Orleans, and Frost is working from a novel called Juryman by Frank Galbally and Robert Macklin. I assume he was faithful, because I can’t find anything about the book on the web.
James Spader plays Cray Fowler, who is running for Democratic Senator and backed by a successful family of oilmen. He’s a young vision of Clinton (the film is circa 1992), and similarly can’t resist following his knob, which soon leads him into the dojo and hot tub of a Vietnamese hottie, Lee (Charlotte Lewis). What a hot tub is doing in a dojo, I don’t know. What Vietnamese have to do with dojos and Japanese architecture in general I also don’t know. And why o why during election season, Cray can’t see that he is being set up is beyond me. Soon, there’s a videotape, blackmail, a dead Vietnamese father, and Cray narrowly escapes being fingered for the crime.
If you’ve followed the film so far, wait. Cray, still a lawyer, decides to defend Lee against the charges that she killed her father, while he also investigates his own father’s decades-old “suicide”. This is what is called a “ballsy gambit.”
Utterly fantastical and nonsensical, Storyville at least succeeds in pulling us along a path where even Grisham would fear to tread. Despite his errors, Cray does what’s right for his constituents and rights old wrongs. How he does so is beyond reason, but he does them nonetheless. My friend Chris loooooves this film, and I think he has some s’plainin’ to do…
PS: Charlotte Lewis is actually a mix of Irish-Iraqi-Chilean. None of these countries have martial arts…