CINEMA: Hollywood's Huck Finns

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IN THE CLIENT, an 11-year-old boy named Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) must get out of dire straits on his own because his father is long gone and his mother is slatternly and foolish. In Angels in the Outfield, an 11-year-old boy named Roger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is left in a foster home by his feckless father and requires the intervention of a heavenly host to help him. In North, an 11- year-old boy named North (Elijah Wood) becomes so disaffected from his parents that he chooses "free agency" and spends the rest of the picture trying to get other grownups to pick up his contract.

What's going on here? A lost-boy trend? A commercial coincidence, based on such earlier successes with this theme as the Home Alone pictures, Terminator 2 and most of Steven Spielberg's oeuvre? An attempt by sly Hollywood to suggest that the family values it has but recently renewed its oath to uphold and defend are actually missing in much of America? Or -- worst-case scenario -- an effort to subvert those values right in the middle of movies that are marketed and rated as family entertainment?

Possibly none of the above. Or some unlikely combination of them all. In generalizing about movies, it's always best to assume that business is being conducted as usual -- that is to say, with a certain casualness about the moral implications of the products. Hey, got enough worries thinking about the weekend grosses.

On that score, the producers can probably relax about The Client. Of the boys of this summer, Mark Sway is the most interesting. He's a sort of updated Huck Finn. Mark is smart, self-reliant and deeply suspicious of grownups ) -- with good reason, as it turns out. Out in the woods, smoking cigarettes stolen from Mom, he encounters a man in the process of committing suicide. Trying (and failing) to prevent it -- the sequence is good and scary -- Mark learns where a certain very interesting body is buried.

Talk about Huck! This kid is soon up the creek without raft or paddle. The Mafia wants to prevent him from talking about the stiff, and an ambitious, media-mad federal prosecutor (Tommy Lee Jones at his smarmy best) is equally determined to get his testimony. Mark's only ally is a nice lady lawyer (Susan Sarandon), shaky-brave and, since she's lost her own children in an ugly divorce, ready to do a little surrogate mothering.

Director Joel Schumacher has made the most successful movie yet of a John Grisham novel. Its acting is the best, its paranoia and its plotting are fairly plausible and, despite its obligations to thriller conventions, it says something pretty truthful about what it's like to be young and neglected these days. Finally, in Brad Renfro the filmmakers have a real find -- a tough, appealing kid whose instinct is not to beg for sympathy but to let it accrue to him naturally.