The Gingerbread Man

• Cat.no: 085 048 2
• Cert: 15
• Running time: 109 minutes
• Year: 1997
• Pressing: 1999
• Region(s): 2, 4 (UK PAL)
• Chapters: 20 plus extras
• Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
• Languages: English, French
• Subtitles: English, French, Dutch
• Widescreen: 1.85:1
• 16:9-enhanced: Yes
• Macrovision: Yes
• Disc Format: DVD 5
• Price: £17.99
• Extras : Scene index, Booklet, Biographies

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Director:

Robert Altman

(Kansas City, The Long Goodbye, M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Player, Pret-a-Porter, Short Cuts, Vincent and Theo)

Producer:

Screenplay:

(based on an original story by John Grisham)

Music:

Cast:

Richard ‘Rick’ Magruder: Kenneth Branagh (Bicentennial Man, Dead Poets Society, The Fisher King, Good Will Hunting, Good Morning Vietnam, Mrs Doubtfire, Patch Adams, TV: Mork and Mindy)
Mallory Doss: Embeth Davidtz (Army of Darkness: The Medieval Dead, Fallen, Matilda, Murder in the First, Schindler’s List, Till Death Do Us Part)
Leeanne Magruder: Famke Janssen (City of Industry, Deep Rising, Goldeneye, Lord of Illusions, Noose, Rounders)
Lois Harlan: Daryl Hannah (Awakenings, The Best Intentions, Dune, The Exorcist 1 & 2, Flash Gordon, Judge Dredd, The Seventh Seal, Until the End of the World)
Dixon Doss: Robert Duvall (Apocalypse Now, The Apostle, A Civil Action, Days of Thunder, Deep Impact, Falling Down, Godfather I & II, Phenomenon, Rambling Rose)

The Gingerbread Man is the first story that writer John Grisham created for the screen, as opposed to his successful book-based career which includes adaptations such as A Time To Kill, The Client, The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Rainmaker.

After meeting up at a party, lawyer Rick Magruder becomes embroiled into the life of a mysterious woman who worked as a waitress there. As he first gets to know Mallory (Embeth Davitz), her car has been stolen so he gives her a lift home where she explains that her father, Dixon Doss (Robert Duvall), isn’t all there and does some bizarre things such as stealing the aforementioned vehicle and being extremely unkind to animals of the feline persuasion. When Magruder takes on the case to get to the bottom of it all, you know that his quip of “It’ll all be over in a week”, will turn out to be anything but as the situation eventually threatens to wreck his life and nothing is as it seems at first, particularly as his emotional relationship with Mallory deepens.

Where the title comes into play is down to the old story Mallory’s father told her when she was a little girl. After the original gingerbread man was baked and then escaped from the house and the fox, allegedly agreeing to carry the gingerbread man across a river on his back, promising *not* to eat him did exactly the opposite, the moral was that her father told her it was just as easy for little children to disappear as it was for gingerbread men…

The cast is fleshed out with Magruder’s helpful colleagues (Daryl Hannah and Robert Downey Jr), his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) and Mallory’s ex-husband (Tom Berenger) but each of these four may as well be sleepwalking…

The picture is fine for most of the film but the opening scene during the credits has a number of artifacts and the print has a lot of scratches at that point. The average bitrate is 5.35 Mb/s briefly peaking close to 9Mb/s and it’s also anamorphically-enhanced for widescreen televisions. The film is presented in its original widescreen ratio of 1.85:1.

The surround soundtrack does a standard job as the town prepared for the arrival of Hurricane Geraldo with the wind and the rain, but it’s hardly demo material. It does come in Dolby Digital 5.1 though.

Extras :

Chapters : There are 20 chapters on this disc, one for the opening Island logo and the rest for the film including one for the end credits. Note that where the booklet details the film’s chapters as 1-19, these will actually appear on the disc as 2-20. There is no trailer on the disc.

Languages & Subtitles : Two languages in Dolby Digital 5.1, English and French, plus subtitles for the same and the Dutch language. However, the English subtitles “crash” at 1:18:03 into the film and need to be reset, which is the first time I’ve ever come across that.

And there’s more… : In the same languages, the book provides cast Biographies on the main characters, but that’s it.

Menu : A static and silent shot mirroring the cover’s collage of faces and the usual options.

I’ve quite enjoyed a number of the previous Grisham thrillers adapted for the screen but perhaps he’s reached saturation point as they all tended to follow the same path and The Gingerbread Man reaches new heights of predictability.

No-one plays their part particularly convincingly, in fact no-one has much of a part to play other than put on a Southern drawl accent, including Branagh, which makes a waste of a fine cast, the biggest travesty of which is giving the usually-excellent Duvall around only five minutes of screen time.

It’s a shame we don’t get the director’s commentary track that the Americans had, although we score one over them by having an anamorphic picture and given the choice I’d take that as an option first if I were to recommend this disc at all. FILM : * PICTURE QUALITY : **** SOUND QUALITY: *** EXTRAS: * ——————————- OVERALL: **

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.