‘The Good Lawyer’ Netflix Review: A French Attorney’s Rocky Road to Redemption

Presented out of competition at last year’s Venice Film Festival, The Good Lawyer blends drama and thriller elements to tell the story of a French attorney caught up in a tangle of legal and personal troubles. Starring Laurent Lafitte, the film works better as a character-driven drama about a lawyer’s rather unconventional and not particularly successful attempts to turn his life around and hold on to his license than as a socioeconomic thriller built around the case he takes on.

When the film opens, Léonard Landry (Lafitte) is a complete mess. The first five minutes, before the opening credits, find him in a state of frantic agitation, constantly snorting cocaine while trying to juggle two cases with hearings scheduled at the same time. Both involve drug traffickers, clients he handles and manipulates through all sorts of shady, thoroughly unprofessional tricks. Then, in the middle of an already chaotic morning, he suddenly collapses in court, passing out in front of everyone. To make matters worse, a bag of cocaine falls out of his pocket, leaving little room for doubt about what’s going on.

Léonard is suspended from practicing law and ordered to spend several weeks in a rehabilitation facility. The moment he has completed the minimum required stay, however, he walks out, determined to find someone who can represent him in his own disciplinary proceedings and prevent him from losing his license. His first choice is Iris Saint-Didier (Mélanie Laurent), a fellow lawyer and former partner, but she wants nothing to do with him. As it happens, a controversial case in Africa offers him a possible way to get back into her good graces. Léonard takes on the case of a multinational French company implicated in a massacre, a corporation for which Saint-Didier herself happens to work as legal counsel. The case gives him an opportunity to strike a deal with her, hopefully convincing her to represent him.

Much of The Good Lawyer follows Léonard and Noé (Anthony Bajon), the young, inexperienced intern who works alongside him, as they try to put together a case that will allow the French company to walk away unscathed, secure compensation for their client and, ideally, get Léonard the legal representation he desperately needs. Needless to say, things don’t quite go according to plan. Running alongside the legal proceedings is another, arguably more important struggle: Léonard’s efforts to stay clean. Noé becomes an essential source of support in that regard, particularly as the temptations keep cropping up with an almost comical degree of persistence.

It’s clear that the legal case never acquires the weight it might have had in a more overtly political or socially minded film about the abuses and manipulations of Western corporations operating in developing countries. While that dimension is central to the plot, it ultimately serves more as a narrative device to put Léonard under pressure and reveal how he behaves when confronted with increasingly difficult situations. Director Tristan Séguéla is less interested in exploring the broader implications of the case than in following his protagonist’s halting, complicated evolution. In a way, the film also becomes a coming-of-age story for Noé, whose role gradually grows in importance as the story unfolds.

Lafitte is particularly good as this hyperactive lawyer who seems determined to bulldoze his way through every obstacle. He’s clever, experienced and talented, always looking for an angle or an advantage in whatever situation comes his way, yet seemingly unaware that he’s doing little more than repeating the same old destructive habits. His journey toward recovery feels much closer to the territory of an addiction drama than that of a legal thriller. And that’s where The Good Lawyer works best: as the story of a man who believes he can handle everything on his own, and who takes a long time to understand that, without other people’s help, he may not be able to accomplish very much at all.