Director Yang Woo-seok’s The Attorney begins with heartwarming, gentle drama, and ends in anger. That is not the usual trajectory for a commercial film. Nonetheless, The Attorney was a commercial smash, selling over 11 million tickets in a country with a population of 50 million. In this and other ways, it is an unusual movie that requires a bit of explanation.
Let’s start with the plot, which is based on a true story. The preternaturally talented Song Kang-ho plays the lead character of Song Woo-seok, who as the film opens is just beginning his legal career. It is the early 1980s, under the military government of autocrat Chun Doo-hwan, but Song is not much interested in politics. After being mocked by his colleagues due to his lack of a university degree, he hits on the idea of providing legal advice to taxpayers. Soon, he is one of the most sought after attorneys in Busan.
All goes well for Song until a soft-spoken university student, the son of a close family friend, is arrested by the police. The boy is accused of being a communist sympathizer, and is mercilessly beaten. Suddenly, Song is wrenched out of his comfortable, routine existence, and out of a sense of personal loyalty he agrees to defend the boy. But in the course of the trial, he feels a powerful sense of responsibility and moral outrage growing within him.
Very observant readers might have noticed that the main character’s name is a combination of the actor’s family name and the director’s given name. This invented moniker is an acknowledgment of the fact that Korean viewers all had a different, real-life name running through their heads as they watched this film: Roh Moo-hyun. A human rights lawyer turned legislator, Roh was elected president of South Korea in 2002. His election was greeted with a euphoria among younger, progressive Koreans not unlike that stirred up by Barack Obama in 2008. But even more so than Obama, Roh’s five years in office were punctuated by sharp disappointments. A little over a year after returning to civilian life, Roh committed suicide. In South Korea’s current political climate, which has swung far to the right, his memory still conjures up raw emotions.
The Attorney is based on Roh’s early life, and his gradual development of a moral and political compass. The film may lack dramatic plot twists, but there is always great drama in watching a character transform onscreen. And thanks to good storytelling and brilliant acting, this film captures that process beautifully.
The Attorney admittedly has a complicated relationship to Korea’s former president. Roh Moo-hyun is never mentioned explicitly in the film, and Song Kang-ho’s performance is not meant to reproduce Roh’s image, as Meryl Streep did with Margaret Thatcher. The story is slightly fictionalized. But the film turned out to be a highly emotional viewing experience for Koreans who miss Roh’s eloquence and idealism.
You don’t need to be Korean, or to remember Roh, to get something out of this film. The story pulls you in and is easy to relate to, even if you’re not familiar with the social backdrop. More than anything, it dramatizes in a powerful way what it means to fight for your ideals and to “speak truth to power.” It’s not so much the case that the film provides hope, because in many ways it reminds you of the fact that this sort of idealistic resistance is less and less common in today’s world. But it does provide some bittersweet comfort and – yes – inspiration. The term “inspiring” is hugely overused in popular film reviewing, but in this case , the word really fits.
Darcy Paquet