[preliminary words—a sort of musical “false start”]
This little review is not the place for me to dilate on the many negatives we can observe of the practiced legal profession; there will be a time for that in this blog. Practicing lawyers comprise one area where an observant artist—whether writer or filmmaker—can find a lot to articulate, and make grounds for comedy or more sober drama. To some extent, a lawyer in his dealings with others is an actor. And to us laypeople, we can learn a lot about what a lawyer does by simply observing—not just the people, of course, but also the abstract material they work with: books of statutes, case reporters, reference works detailing requirements for legal processes, and so on.
There are two main aspects to practiced law, and this also means there are two types of people: there is the abstract side of law, entailing the general notion of law and all the high-mindedness (and, in more pathological instances, delusional tendencies) that notion implies—where law is a sort of ether surrounding us everywhere, which the lawyer as “officer of the court” is a sort of exclusively licensed custodian helping to support, add to, protect, and so on. And there is the practical side of the law, entailing the tons of paperwork and reading, filling out forms properly, formatting documents properly for submission to a court, following the six million rules of court and rules of professional conduct, etc. This bifurcation of law into the abstract and the practical also means you find two kinds of personalities: for instance, municipal attorneys can seem like either a “judge” type (employing fancy language even in addressing small issues) or a “clerk” type (a whiz with addressing the details fairly much on the details’ own terms).
Another aspect of lawyers gets more into territory I would rather delve into when I look at the Coen brothers’ treatment of lawyers in their movies: how lawyers have a set of presuppositions—about who they are and what they do—and practical heuristics that tend to lead them to being the following “aloof” if not disgustingly self-centered way, which I’ve concluded to after dealing with them for many years with many different issues, though the fact that a lot of the issues have involved the peculiarities of the media industry defines this to a large extent: they never (or very rarely) as much as meet you halfway to understand your line of work or the industry you’re in, while to get something out of them or their field, you have to go more than halfway to understand them and their field. If people think I really want to be a lawyer, they are wrong—I don’t; but what I want is for my own sorry ass’s legal rights to be respected, and lawyers are amazingly consistent in failing to meet this demand in my own experience, so I have to learn how to function in their own area, acting pro se a lot of the time. Or, to put it in the slightly edited words of George Harrison in his song “Not Guilty,” “I’m not trying to be smart / I want only what I can get.”
But back to the difference—under normal circumstances—between the abstract and the practical in lawyers. Add to this the fact that a solo practitioner attorney can be said to be the loneliest type, the one most pressed to keep himself together for the sake of his practice and of whoever is/are his dependent(s), and you realize that a lawyer may need to be someone who not only is a seemingly obsessive-compulsive, who knows how to dot every i and cross every t, but is like any small businessman: he has to wear a number of hats as he attends to the many aspects of running a business: being his own equipment repairman; making sure his secretary is well provided for in terms of employment basics (salary plus “bennies,” help in troubleshooting certain business-logistical issues, etc.); and not least, scouting up new business (while, in the attorney’s case, there are ethical limitations on how to do this).
As I get older, I find it interesting how solo practitioners find creative ways to bring in a little income when the cases aren’t rolling in as thickly as needed (to help with their estimated tax payments, or the like). Years ago, in 1981, I (as the only college student, I think) was among a small group of high schoolers and others who helped an attorney sell Easter flowers on the streets near Philadelphia to drag in a few bucks. (My sister linked me up with this opportunity—it’s a bit of a weird story how this came about….) The attorney and his middle-aged helper got the most, I think, and we kids split the rest. (I was too young to know why the attorney did something so peculiar; you hypothesize about the motivation later—unless in his case he had a drug habit.)
Some attorneys have their office on a lot including another source of revenue that they own, which some businessperson may lease from them: a seedy motel or a diner that (maybe minimally) meets local health-department standards. Some may lease out parking space to park-and-ride commuters, or pull in rent from another tenant in the office building they own.
Tom McCarthy’s movies, well crafted and very detail-oriented, are mainly about the emergent richness of human relationships that manifest as, because of unusual conditions, people are newly given the opportunity to help each other out, or otherwise address each other’s needs, in which we see the full complement of what it means it be a person: generosity, pain, occasional missteps, and so on. His The Station Agent looks at how a random constellation of suddenly-thrown-together people are supports to one another while two of them are in stages of grief. In The Visitor, a bereft professor finds a new (more richly emotional) side of himself when he finds, day by day, a way to help out a couple of illegal immigrants who he finds were fraudulently led to lease his city apartment.
And in Win Win, an attorney gains entrée into helping out a couple strangers, in different ways, because of a different kind of “being in grief”: as an attorney specializing in elder law (showing what a sort of low-key, modestly self-defined lawyer he is), his business is falling on hard times—yes, it’s a post-2008-financial-crisis story—and instead of (early on) becoming a bartender to help make ends meet, he does something ethically questionable to bring in an extra steady check, and this leads to a cornucopia of new opportunities to help others and himself, as well as thorny complications.
Paul Giamatti as this attorney, Mike Flaherty, shows how he deals with this all as both a respectable enough hustler of a small businessperson and a well-meaning paterfamilias who tries to drag in new business because, with all else, he has young mouths at home to feed.
[Full review to come before long, I hope.]
