The Devil's Advocate

Taylor Hackford's 1997 supernatural thriller operates in a register so distant from contemporary progressive sensibilities that measuring it against such metrics feels almost absurd, yet here we are. The film concerns itself primarily with metaphysical dread and the corruption of the legal profession, deploying Al Pacino's scenery-chewing Satan as a vehicle for musings on temptation and human weakness. These are timeless themes, or at least they were when Hackford was shooting this film on New York soundstages in the mid-nineties.

The casting does include a reasonably diverse ensemble and features two significant female characters, though neither Charlize Theron nor Connie Nielsen's roles break from the standard supporting positions allocated to women in studio thrillers of the era. Theron's character exists primarily as the threatened wife, a repository for the protagonist's moral anxieties rather than an agent of her own narrative. The film's modest critique of corporate greed and Wall Street excess, which might read as vaguely anti-capitalist to a contemporary viewer, is really just the standard moral panic of mainstream Hollywood about lawyers selling their souls. This is not a systemic analysis but rather a familiar morality tale dressed in Armani suits.

The film is fundamentally apolitical, concerned with the supernatural and the sensational. Its progressive elements, such as they are, feel accidental rather than intentional, the natural byproduct of casting actors of various backgrounds in a major studio production. One observes that the film predates the contemporary moment of progressive cultural awareness by sufficient margin that expecting it to register on such measures seems somewhat generous. Yet the exercise itself has value in establishing how thoroughly 1997 occupied a different moral universe.