The Firm.

The Firm, based on John Grisham's best-selling novel, is such a movie, in which the characters vie with the gadgetry as to who can be more machine-like. And when, in a long film, everything moves at an unremittingly breakneck pace--intrigue and counterintrigue, plus the dialogue itself--I feel that Chaplin, in Modern Times, engorged by a noncomputerized machine, was still living in Arcadia. O for the thrillers by Simenon, Agatha Christie, and their likes, when the dramatics personae were not Martians with hypertrophice heads housing computers instead of minds.

Mitch McDeere, our hero, is the top Harvard Law School graduate of the year, and of all the law firms competing for him, a small Memphis one, Bendini, Lambert & Locke, bids highest and gets him. Mitch, from a poor family, and Abby, his well-born grade-school-teacher wife, are a model couple until the Firm takes over their lives. At first by forceful insinuation, then by discreet intimidation, they guide the couple into luxurious but regimented existences, highly conventional on the outside, the better to hide the Firm's criminal activities. The forty-odd tax lawyers are experts at bending the law, or invisibly mending it where they rip it. Among their money-laundering clients are the Chicago Mafia, but the ultimate profiteers are they themselves. If someone wants to quit the Firm, he finds that the only way out is feet forward.

Abby senses trouble right away, but by the time Mitch catches on, they are enmeshed beyond reprieve. It brings Mitch closer to the loving older brother, Ray, whose very existence he denied. Ray, a wrestler, accidentally killed a man in a barroom brawl, and is doing a long stretch in jail. Ray's friend, a private eye, wants to help him, but is gunned down by the Firm's goons (don't ask me what led them to him) while his secretary-mistress is hiding inside his desk. The FBI has approach Mitch: they will pay him and even get Ray out on parole if Mitch will take on the dangerous job of being their inside man, helping to catch his fellow illegal beagles. Meanwhile the Firm has entrapped the loving Mitch into a quick tumble into the nocturnal sands of a Cayman Island beach with a pretty hooker. When, driven by the threat of blackmail, he confesses to Abby, she goes to pieces and sets out to leave him.

And more, alas, much more. Sydney Pollack nudges the movie on as if it were a marathon run at a hundred-year-dash pace, and the three top-flight screenwriters--David Rabe, Robert Towne, and David Rayfiel--may even have turned it into a relay race, passing ideas back and forth like batons or, perhaps, hot potatoes. An array of good actors, led by Gene Hackman, Holly Hunter, and Ed Harris, makes the best of a bad business, but Tom Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn, as the romantic leads, fare less well. Going through the same hectic motions as always, with the same computer-controlled panic expression and high-pitched voice, Cruise zooms through the movie more like a missile than an actor.