The Devil’s Advocate and the Antichrist’s Journey

     I have very mixed feelings about the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate. On the one hand, parts of the movie do feel uncomfortably mean-spirited, especially toward women, people of color and people living in poverty. Not that I think it’s intentionally racist or misogynistic, just extremely cynical in a very 1990s sort of way that hasn’t aged quite so well.

     But on the other hand, I think The Devil’s Advocate works as a brilliant ironic deconstruction of traditional Hollywood storytelling and the very concept of the Hero’s Journey. The story is one of Satanic temptation and corruption, but it’s presented in the format of a standard heroic character arc. What in most films might constitute likeable traits are the very flaws which lead the protagonist into moral decline.

     In case you aren’t familiar, The Devil’s Advocate stars Keanu Reeves as Kevin Lomax, a highly competent but morally flexible defense attorney who’s recruited to work at a major law firm owned by a man who is secretly the Devil (played to camp perfection by Al Pacino). As he rises through the ranks, Lomax indulges in more and more unethical conduct until Satan deems him ready to learn the truth — Lomax is his son, the Antichrist, and if he so chooses he can help the Devil bring about the end of the world.

     He ultimately rejects this fate, and he’s sent back in time and given the chance to take a different career path. He recuses himself from a case defending a child predator and decides to take a public moral stand. But the film ends with him succumbing to a new temptation as he pridefully accepts an interview to boast about his decision. The journalist’s face morphs into evil Al Pacino, and bam! “Paint It, Black” by the Rolling Stones. A perfectly bleak and hopeless ending.

Al Pacino as Satan in The Devil's Advocate

     There’s so much to be said about this film’s portrayal of Satan and the supernatural. The Devil is associated with everything from corporate hustle culture to infertility to breast implants to Donald Trump (yes) to incest to a vague, demonized form of “voodoo.” Any one scene in the movie could form the basis for pages of analysis.

     But, as I said, what I’d like to focus on here is the film’s subversion of the Hero’s Journey. I’ve taken many writing and screenwriting classes over the years, and Joseph Campbell is one name that has come up frustratingly often. Campbell’s famous theory of the universal Hero’s Journey wildly oversimplifies countless different traditions from around the world to fit an unhelpfully specific model of storytelling.

     And sadly, it's an even further simplified version that usually gets parroted in writing classes. For a good while, screenwriters have been taught the Hero’s Journey as a formula for engaging movie plots. George Lucas, for example, took inspiration from Campbell in writing Star Wars. The tropes and archetypes associated with this model — the call to adventure, the meeting of the mentor, the retrieval of the ultimate boon, etc. — can be found throughout modern cinema.

     In The Devil’s Advocate, these concepts are all turned on their head. Lomax is like the archetypal hero in that he is talented (at winning cases) and driven to succeed. For him, the call to adventure comes when an associate at Satan’s law firm offers him a job. Like any archetypal hero, he must decide whether to remain in the ordinary world he’s used to in Florida, or to take up the offer and go to New York. He has his temporary refusal of the call, his farewell to his mother, everything.

     And then, of course, he meets his mentor — “John Milton” a.k.a. the Devil. Milton assigns Lomax missions, offers him advice and teaches him how to face the challenges of the legal profession and the big city. During this period he also meets other archetypal characters, like a rival and a love interest (who later turns out to be his sister). His greatest test, the Campbellian Ordeal, arrives in the form of a murder case. He has to defend a corrupt, Donald Trump-esque (they even filmed in Trump’s actual apartment) real estate baron accused of killing his wife, stepson and maid.

     By giving up all his morals, ignoring warning signs and neglecting his own increasingly ill wife, Lomax is able to win the case (gaining the ultimate boon) and seal his fate. At this point, he must reckon with his parents, his earthly mother and his demonic father, to learn the truth about his identity. In the confrontation with his father, he is offered the chance to begin a new life as the Antichrist.

     This all looks to me like a deliberate perversion of the archetypal Hero’s Journey, with the hero’s every step closer to his goal taking him further from goodness. Satan says a couple times that Lomax’s greatest flaw is vanity, and this manifests in the film as a desire for corporate success, for an impressive reputation, for an uncomplicated extramarital affair, etc., all of which drive his anti-heroic quest.

     But what truly cements The Devil’s Advocate as a great deconstruction of the Hero’s Journey is its ending. Lomax rejects Satan’s offer, the evil resurrection which his journey has been building to, and is resurrected in a very different way, returning to the choice he made at the beginning of the film to defend a pedophile he knew was guilty. This time, knowing all he has to lose if he goes down the wrong path, he makes a different choice and recuses himself from the case.

     But when he decides to take the interview about his decision, he finds himself once again assuming the role of hero. Only now, instead of success as a great defense attorney, he’s pursuing fame as an upstanding moral citizen. One can only imagine where this new journey might lead our protagonist.

     Of course, as Satan points out, this ostensibly more righteous path is just another manifestation of Lomax’s vanity. In fact, knowingly embarking on a Hero’s Journey within the film is presented as practically synonymous with succumbing to vanity. It’s so tempting to think of ourselves as the protagonists of our own lives, but The Devil’s Advocate argues that this sort of thinking fuels evil in the world.

     Even without Satan’s influence, the film leads us to believe, Lomax would be a fundamentally negative influence on others. It’s in his nature, in human nature, to pursue selfish goals. The Devil acts as a manifestation of the destructive spiral associated with this kind of behavior. He encourages Lomax to indulge his vanity, ushers him into a position of power, connects him with other like-minded people and isolates him from those who might be positive influences.

     The Devil’s Advocate isn’t a perfect film by any means, but I do think it smartly uses its structure to convey its themes, and serves as a refreshing subversion of the all-too-popular Hero’s Journey.