capsule : starts off as a legal thriller , but mutates into something much closer to the heart -- and features gene hackman in a typically excellent performance . some movies lead you wrong , and that's a good thing . the chamber , adapted from the john grishamn novel , starts off as a typical legal-thriller-with-a-twist , but then slowly turns into a different sort of story , about one man trying to find the truth about the past and another man trying to find the truth about himself . the two men are adam hall , a young chicago laywer , and his grandfather , sam cayhall . cayhall is a product of the worst breeds of southern racism , in whose fold he built and detonated several bombs . " i never meant to kill anyone , " he repeats angrily , but bombs are generally not designed to do much else , and three trials and countless appeals later , he is now on death row . hall , his grandson , has decided to take on the eleventh-hour defense . hall and cayhill do not like each other . cayhill has no use for lawyers -- most of the reasons , it seems at first , are blatantly racist , and don't bear repeating here ( even though they are delivered with consummate skill by hackman ) . hall doesn't like the bitter old man , but he smells a great deal is being held away from a lot of people's noses here , and digs . he finds a lot . as the movie unwound , i felt it could have gone one of two ways : either it could have developed the plot to the point where the human story became more irrelevant and therefore could be resolved with a mechanical flourish ( the way the dreadful a time to kill ended up ) , or it could pay closer attention to the people in the story . it takes the second road , and is all the better for it . and be warned : as a result , we don't get a nice , tidy conclusion -- a lot of threads are left dangling , probably deliberately , since the real conclusion of the movie is in the way hackman's character handles his oncoming fate . eventually we see that his racism is not so much a philosophy as a way of warding off terrible grief and hurt , and self-hatred ( as is the case with most virulently racist people , they compensate violently for not having what they feel should be simply given to them gratis ) . hall ( played by chris o'donnell with maturity and grace ) also has a transformation of his own , but a smaller one : sometimes it's not possible to use the law as a way to repair what has gone wrong , just to comment on it . he resents his grandfather for using the same tired excuses , but at the same time batters patiently at the man's defenses , knowing that it's only a matter of time before the imminence of the clock will get him to say something true to his heart . he does . 
