The Attorney is one of the most important movies of the year. It's one of the biggest movies ever in South Korea, which is even more amazing considering it's about one of the darker times in its nation's history. Try to imagine an alternate reality where Good Night and Good Luck was the biggest movie of 2005, even bigger than the superhero flick, and you have some idea.
I bring up that film specifically because they're both about government witch hunts for "godless communists" and the iconic men who tried to stop them. Song Kang-ho plays Song Woo-seok, a money-hungry-but-above-board attorney specializing in real estate and tax law. He's oblivious to the protestors outside his window. He views them as a nuisance, and during a dinner with friends, he accuses the college students of just trying to get out of class.
But his tune changes when the son of the restaurant owner goes missing. His distraught mother searches all over Busan, even in the morgue. She eventually gets a letter from the government informing her that her son has been arrested for crimes against the state and will be put on trial with some of his classmates in two days. She turns to Song to defend her son, even though he doesn't know much about criminal law. Yet he has passion, and that turns into rage once he learns of the torture her son endured for a false confession.
His passion carries the movie, which is often too on-the-nose in its politics. The movie's also a real crowd-pleaser"”though not in an everything's going to be OK way"”but also seems prescient about what's going on in the world. The case that inspired the film actually happened in South Korea in 1981, but it feels like the corrupt justice system and government it's portraying could be in any country today, even in republics like the United States.
"This could never happen here," many people would say. They probably said that in Egypt and Ukraine, too.
The Attorney is a triumphant good-vs-evil tale, even if the victory isn't the kind we're used to in America. It will receive a limited release in February, and while it's not a perfect movie, it's too important to miss.
