Plot
Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is a young man with a promising future in law. About to graduate from Harvard Law School, he is approached by Bendini, Lambert & Locke, 'The Firm', and made an offer he cannot refuse. He and his wife, Abigail "Abby" (Jeanne Tripplehorn), move to Memphis, where The Firm is located. Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) becomes his mentor at The Firm.
Seduced by the money and gifts showered on him, including a house and car, he is at first totally oblivious to the more sinister side of his company. Then, two associates are murdered. The FBI contacts him, asking him for information and informing him that The Firm is connected to the mob, and that every associate who has ever tried to leave The Firm ends up murdered. His life as he knows it is forever changed. He has a choice: work with the FBI and risk being discovered by The Firm or losing his law license because he believes that attorney–client confidentiality prevents him from revealing the firm’s illegal activities to investigators (In reality, if Mitch were to reveal the Confidential Information he would not have lost his law license as Rule 1.6(b)(2) of Lawyer's Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an exception to reveal such information.), or stay with The Firm and both violate his personal code of ethics and go to jail when the FBI cracks The Firm. Either way he will lose his life as he knows it.
Mitch devises a plan that allows him to cooperate with the FBI by finding proof that all partners from The Firm were guilty of overbilling, while at the same time reaching an agreement with the mob Morolto brothers. In addition he manages to do so without breaking any laws, thereby being able to keep his status as a lawyer.
At the end of the film, the McDeeres leave their house in Memphis for Boston, driving the same car they arrived in.
Read more about this topic: The Firm (1993 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)