Movie Review: ‘THE ATTORNEY’

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Actor Kang-ho Song has been making quite a name for himself lately. The Korean film star has made an impression on Western audiences in crossover hits like The Host (2006), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002),  and The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) and is to appear in Joon-ho Bong’s highly anticipated English language debut Snowpiercer later this year. In all his roles he’s had an off-kilter quirkiness. In The Attorney he tones it down and gives a very low-key performance, for the first half at least. He plays Song Woo-Seok, a low level tax attorney who is initially the laughing stock of the lawyer world, but quickly finds a decent amount of success.

The first thirty minutes of the movie is a fairly effective puff piece. We see flashes of his life as he’s struggling to make ends meet. His wife has just had their first kid, he’s working a menial job in construction, and most importantly we see him skip out on a bill at a restaurant to pay for his law textbooks. Flash forward some seven years, he’s now doing well for himself, his son is grown up and has a little sister, and he’s just moved into a new apartment that he had built all those years ago when he was just a young lad. In a most crucial scene, he takes his family out to dinner to the very same restaurant he ran out on all those years ago to repay the lady and her son who run the shop of the bill he ran out on so many years ago. This first half hour of the film is hell-bent on getting you to like Song.

From here, the movie takes a dark turn. The restaurant owner’s son, Jin-Woo is taken prisoner by the corrupt Korean government and detained along with his classmates. The reason? The police believe their innocent little “book club” is actually a front for a secret communist propaganda meeting. Jin-Woo and his compatriots are tortured and beaten until they are forced to sign confessions of guilt that they were an anti-government propaganda group. After meeting a beaten and disheveled Jin-Woo in a dingy prison meeting room, Song takes it upon himself to defend Jin-Woo and his book club in a case of national security. He takes the case against personal and professional hardship. His family receives death threats from the police and his co-workers at his firm don’t support him because taking a case of national security puts their relationship with a high profile client at risk.

The Attorney states at the beginning of the film that it is based on a true story. After watching the film, I did a little research and found out about the “Burim Case” that occurred in 1981 which dealt with a group of students who were falsely detained for potentially spreading propaganda, and the lawyer that defended them, on which Kang-Ho Song bases the character of Song Woo-Seok. That lawyer was Moo-hyun Roh, and after the Burim Case went on to be the President of South Korea.

The film has some very excellent courtroom scenes where Song gives some very impassioned and emotional speeches on the meaning and importance of human civil  liberties. While it may feel a little emotionally manipulative and formulaic in some areas, The Attorney is a powerful true life story of how one man can challenge his repressive government, and in our current political era where human rights are constantly being challenged in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, this film is feels extraordinarily relevant.