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The Rainmaker was once merely an average film about lawyers starring Matt Damon. Now, thanks to the magic of television, it’s a below-average series about lawyers starring a man who looks like Matt Damon. This is one Milo Callaghan, whose jawline suggests a certain mettle, but whose acting suggests much woe. Or at least a fitful unease with the role in which he finds himself. Accordingly, he drifts around this 10-part John Grisham adaptation with the air of a man who has forgotten what he came into the courtroom for, certain only that whatever it was, it was not a drama that compels him to say things like: “Ah just wanna be a lawyer.”
Callaghan plays Rudy Baylor, an ambitious South Carolina law graduate with a social conscience and a thirst for justice. Rudy wants to make a difference but dammit if his fiery temper don’t keep conspirin’ to screw up his plans. The huffing greenhorn is even late for his first day at prestigious law firm Tinley Britt, having spent the morning hurling his mom’s lunkish boyfriend around the garden (“You think ah’m gonna let you keep leechin’ off ma mother? Gnyaaarrr!”).
Insouciant new boss Leo F Drummond (Mad Men’s John Slattery) promptly fires the sod. “I am the punishment of God,” he drawls, gliding around the boardroom like a shaved eagle on castors. “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” A smirk. “Genghis Khan. Warrior. Would’ve made a great litigator.”
Alas, this is the sort of programme that equates tea-towel quotations with gravitas, and we must endure several more such guffstorms as the series progresses. (Or rather, as the series goes on. “Progresses” feels too optimistic a term for a drama that features the line, “This kid’s got balls.”)
Unlike the 1995 novel from which it takes (some of) its characters and (fewer of) its themes, The Rainmaker is a startlingly uncomplicated affair. This is not the type of legal drama in which characters harbour tortuous secrets and plots contort themselves into unexpected shapes. This is not The Good Fight, or Suits, or Damages, or even Boston Legal, the sporadically magnificent mid-00s comedy-drama in which an empurpled William Shatner puffed and rumbled like the world’s cheeriest internal organ. Instead, it’s a straightforwardly soapy affair, a glossy show-and-tell in which linear storytelling is soundtracked by incessant MOR country-rock and characters are introduced with lines such as: “You’re Wilfred Keeley, CEO of Great Benefit Hospital Systems, one of Tinley Britt’s most important clients!”
The plot? If we must. Having been booted out of Tinley Britt, Baylor washes up at a one-horse personal injury firm operating out of an abandoned taco joint. Here he finds sassy maverick Joceyln “Bruiser” Stone (Lana Parrilla), who does her bit for feminism by hoisting her bosom nostrilwards and refusing to pay Baylor a living wage. His first case? An unlawful death suit that will offer the hothead a chance to subject The Man to the full force of his pleated chinos. Unfortunately, it will also pit him against both his former boss and his lawyer girlfriend (“What happens when Leo finds out my boyfriend is suing his prize client?!”) – but them’s the judicial breaks, kid. And so forth.
It’s peculiar, in this day and age, to find a series so wilfully devoid of depth, authenticity and nuance. So much so that you may find yourself initially denying The Rainmaker’s pounding simplicity, assuming that if you squint for long enough, interesting things will start to appear, emerging as if from a magic eye picture composed solely of gavels and shouting. But no. It’s tedious. Baylor’s boohoo backstory is revealed in the first few minutes (his brother died before he could fulfil his dream of bein’ a lawyer) and everything from motivation to the identity of the baddies is spelled out in 800pt HOPE YOU’RE GETTING ALL THIS AT THE BACK typeface.
Will Baylor stop punchin’ and start litigatin’? And thus, in turn, start livin’? The answer is yawnin’ in the wind.
