“That says it all to me”: Julia Roberts once resolved the ambiguity of ‘The Pelican Brief’
In the 1990s, rising and established stars alike were clambering over themselves to get involved in Hollywood’s hottest gravy train, with Julia Roberts just one of many to lend her talents to the onslaught of John Grisham adaptations.
The arrival of Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman’s The Firm in 1993 kicked down the doors and established the author as one of the industry’s favoured content sources, with another seven of his works being brought to the big screen in the next decade. Strangely, though, there hasn’t been a single legal thriller based on a Grisham tome for more than 20 years after the short-lived craze ran its course.
The first to follow The Firm was Alan J Paluka’s The Pelican Brief, which was released less than six months later. It was always guaranteed to be a box office hit when it boasted massively popular Pretty Woman star Roberts and Academy Award-winning favourite Denzel Washington in the lead roles, so on that front, it comfortably lived up to expectations.
Roberts was as engaging as ever in the part of Darby Shaw, a bright-eyed and enthusiastic law student who unwittingly opens a can of worms when her theory on the assassination of two high-profile judges makes her a target for hired killers, with her mentor and paramour murdered after she started getting a little too close to the truth for comfort.
Washington’s journalist Gray Grantham is determined to unravel every thread, leading him to go on the run with Darby so they can expose a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of government. It may not be the best Grisham flick, but The Pelican Brief is the sort of meat-and-potatoes star-powered genre thriller that can’t do anything other than entertain, with a box office haul close to $200million evidence enough.
Reflective of the time it was made, though, some audiences were left disappointed that Roberts and Washington’s characters never became an official item. The sparks and chemistry were there, but it was never officially cemented in the film, with the leading man flat-out refusing to take Darby and Gray’s obvious connection to the next level.
However, The Pelican Brief ends on an ambiguous note nonetheless, with Darby watching Grantham on TV. After he’s brought the culprits to justice, he suggests his unnamed source is almost too good to be true. She smiles, the credits roll, and nobody is any the wiser as to whether or not a full-blown relationship developed between them.
Fortunately, Roberts was on hand to explain to Entertainment Weekly what happened afterwards, from her perspective at least. “To me, the end of the movie, they’re absolutely together,” she said. “They’re watching TV. She’s watching him on TV. Yeah. And then the journalist says, ‘Well, your source seems too good to be true.’ And he says, in a way that only Denzel can, ‘She just might be.’”
Putting an even finer point on it, Roberts proclaimed that “I think he’s in love with her” and “she’s in love with him,” so there was a Hollywood ending after all, albeit one that didn’t make it into the final cut.
