The murder of a lawyer's wife takes second place in importance to the impact of gossip on members of the small town. By gossip, I mean the exchange of supposedly confidential information about persons and their relationships. It's a better research problem than murder because we can all understand why someone might kill someone for personal reasons. They hurt us or they stand in our way. But when malicious gossip endangers the peace of mind and the social status of a heretofore upstanding citizen, we must wonder about it. What is it that makes some of us hate well-known and respected people? Why do we seem so eager to believe everything bad about them? The victim doesn't even get a trial, just summary judgment.<br /><br />Briefly, the plot is this. Peter Coyote is a kind of smug defense lawyer who gets Lesley Ann Warren off after she murders her husband. Coyote beams. He's won yet another case, which makes him look good but makes the police chief look like an idiot.<br /><br />Warren becomes enamored of Coyote, power and celebrity being the aphrodisiacs that they are, but Coyote is happily married and has a few kids. He spurns her advances. Hell hath no fury like a woman spurned. Warren hires some dumb stud to kill Coyote's wife, telling the murderer that the whole thing is being instigated by Coyote himself. After the killing, Warren blames Coyote publicly and at the grand jury she testifies that she was nothing more than an intermediary between Coyote and the killer. The cops having been humiliated by Coyote once too often, are happy to dig up whatever circumstantial evidence they can to make him look bad.<br /><br />Then the plot falls apart. Warren takes the stand to make sure that Coyote gets skinned alive, but she begins to stutter. The media describe this as a "nervous breakdown on the stand." (It would be nice to see a courtroom drama in which nobody has a nervous breakdown on the stand.) Coyote is set free. He walks out of the courtroom vowing never to leave Travis.<br /><br />I don't know why he doesn't leave Travis. With some exceptions, the towns folk seem to have leaped on him like a rabid pack of his namesakes on a rotting pronghorn carcass. And what kind of climax is that, anyway? All this intrigue, murder, family love, gossip, and what happens? Nothing really, except that Coyote is let go.<br /><br />Peter Coyote is a pretty good actor. He's confident and professional. Lesley Ann Warren is very sexy but cannot act. She should have made more soft-core skin flicks. Those goggling dark eyes, her breathless quivering voice, he nervous little laughs, her tics. Nobody else really stands out.<br /><br />No more than average. It should have gotten more into the dynamics of small-town gossip but the movie isn't ambitious or dark enough to tackle a subject so reluctant to yield simple answer.