At a gangly two and a quarter hours, Devil's Advocate is without doubt history's longest and fanciest lawyer joke, albeit a grim and sometimes floridly lurid one. On the one hand a campy, awkward melange of Rosemary's Baby and The Firm, it is also the best lawyer film since Sidney Lumet's 1982 classic, and really incomparable, The Verdict, in which an ambulance-chasing drunk (Paul Newman) finds a quiet but full-blown redemption. If Devil's Advocate is any evidence, we have now concluded that lawyers are quite beyond hope, for in this film, well, the ultimate Bad Guy wins, and wins big.

In the real world, needless to say, that is not a cheerful prospect. What makes Devil's Advocate fun is the wit and ingenuity of its incisive portrait of evil, especially of the way evil accomplishes the destruction for which it yearns. Give Nathaniel Hawthorne a smile and a camera, put him in contemporary Manhattan, and you might get something like Devil's Advocate, only it would be a lot better.

The naive young man who runs, Hawthorne-style, into big-time evil is Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), a back-country Florida lawyer who has never lost a case either as prosecutor or defense attorney. His success lies in an uncanny ability to pick sympathetic juries and, fueling that, an egotism that wins at any cost, even to the point of exonerating ugly-guilty molesters.

A record like that attracts the attention of big-time New York law firms, and Lomax finds himself and his pretty wife whisked away, with seeming magic, to the Big Apple, on which he is more than eager to feed. Wooed and beguiled and successful, Lomax lands on the fast track as the protege of head-honcho John Milton (Al Pacino), who cavorts here, barely incognito, as Old Nick himself—wily, depraved, and bemused. Milton (the name is a feeble literary joke, alluding to the poet William Blake's contention that, in Paradise Lost, his great predecessor John Milton actually sided with Satan) spends a lot of time "in the air" or in New York's subway underground. Get it?

But Lomax doesn't get it. On first meeting, Milton invites Lomax to "walk with" him atop a skyscraping high-rise, a roof that seems the very fount of the world, and there Milton tempts him, body and soul, with Manhattan itself and, by extension, the whole of the world. Nor does the kid catch the clues in Milton's peculiar habits and capacities: unsleeping, ubiquitous, clairvoyant, predatory, omnilingual, and omnisexual. Clouding Lomax's sight, of course, is the fact that he soon gets the perks of a partner, and before he blinks, he is a partner. A fundamentalist kid from Florida should know better, even if he is on "parole" from his past.

The rub comes when Lomax's wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron), gets spooked, quite literally. The opulent veneer of the ultra-posh world in which they live cracks to expose within a sink of corruption and perversity, which the film rather relishes depicting. For one, the firm's pampered boutique-hopping wives prove to be very tony witches, having long ago joined Milton's minions. Before long, nightmares, infertility, and eventually Milton plague the young wife, and she slides from homesickness into terror and catatonia.

All the while husband Kevin fervidly pursues the defense of a rancid mega-developer accused of killing his own wife, stepchild, and maid. So oblivious is Kevin that even Milton counsels him to leave the case to tend to his disintegrating wife. Later, says the young barrister—after he wins this really big one. And then come the surprises.

The first of these is the full revelation of Milton as Satan. What impresses is not his cartoon loathsomeness, which he will finally repulsively exhibit, but his integrity and moral intelligence. The Devil is smart, fair-minded, honest, and patient, which is a lot more than he allows for God. In dealing with humankind, he does not so much overtake or possess people as entice them, providing the occasion for them to achieve what their darkest hearts really want.

Thus, when Lomax indicts Milton for Mary Ann's dire fate, the Devil not only denies responsibility but pins the crime on Lomax, quoting the young man back to himself in Lomax's own voice, emphasizing that the husband could have saved Mary Ann at any time; instead, he was "involved with someone else—yourself." To be sure, Lomax is very sharp, slick, pretty, and successful—all those traits his culture esteems as redemptive—but he selfishly makes his own fate and, worse still, Mary Ann's doom. Self-love is, after all, as Milton tells him, the one sure-fire "all-natural opiate." Alas, Lomax does what comes naturally, just being a good lawyer, which he interprets to mean winning, always. He proves an easy mark, for as the Devil likes to repeat, "Vanity is my favorite sin."

For all the wonders of his guile, Milton-Satan is nonetheless not nice. Satan wants it all—namely, the death of Heaven—and he gleefully subverts everything he can in order ultimately to invert the God-ordained order of Love. His hope is that with enough lawyers running around, Satan's "new priesthood" of numberless Kevin-clones, Earth's stench of corruption will reach to Heaven and suffocate All-Goodness.

The tough part is that Milton's demeanor belies this: the firm looks properly corporate, even though it smuggles arms, deals in chemical weapons, dumps toxic waste, and launders drug money, and Milton himself is debonair, caring, and witty, an attractive, pleasant, fatherly fellow. Only after a long while does it come clear, and then very jarringly, that Milton is nonetheless the Eternal Abuser, who dangles sweet blandishments to entice the curious to hideous fates, which are here rather too graphically presented (the movie is not for the tender, earning every bit of its R rating).

The biggest surprise comes in the late revelation, too late for Lomax, that Milton is Lomax's very own father. The truth is that 30 years before, Lomax's fundamentalist mother was seduced by a Bible-spouting waiter at a youth convention in New York City. And now Milton would have his son mate with his half-sister, predictably another lawyer, to conceive the anti-Christ, and that indeed would be the beginning of the real End.

The penultimate Hawthornian twist comes when Lomax suddenly awakes, back in Florida, to find that this personal cataclysm has been but a dream, a nightmare from who-knows-where. Chastened by his glimpse of the hell he wrought, he opts to abandon law, home free at last, or so he thinks. In one last ironic slice that would gladden the sober heart of Hawthorne, the ending makes crystal clear that the Devil has not forsaken young Kevin but will have another go at that thirsty ego, more vulnerable than ever amid its presumption of reform and rectitude.

Devil's Advocate is by no means a great picture, especially as it sprawls around and turns very talky. Much of that talk is pop theology from Satan's point of view (God is the "Prankster" putting together a "cosmic gag-reel"), but this exposition mostly comes in a rush at the end when the screenplay tries to clarify all those ideas it hasn't gotten around to dramatizing.

More bothersome still is the extent to which the film exhibits the very crassness that it so vehemently indicts in lawyers. Repeatedly director Taylor Hackford, with his characteristic taste for histrionics, supplies large measures of sex, foul language, and especially violence, which seriously undercut the sardonic tone of the film. A heartbeat after some gruesome display the story cuts to wise-cracking Milton. Reeling still from the last shot, the audience is supposed to laugh. Further, Hackford really seems to think more is more to the extent of pushing nasty voyeuristic staging and camera movement. Audiences move from observation, containing some degree of distance, to inescapable participation, and that crosses an increasingly fuzzy cinematic boundary. Hackford could learn something from Hawthorne about indirection and suggestion in fathoming the darkness of souls.

Still, despite this frequent ham-fistedness, Devil's Advocate works pretty well, and given the prevailing fluff in theaters, it is well worth a couple of hours in the dark. To be sure, clumsy cautionary tales are better than none at all.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College.

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