A CIVIL ACTION (Touchstone) Starring: John Travolta, Robert Duvall, William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub, Zeljko Ivanek, Bruce Norris, John Lithgow, Kathleen Quinlan. Screenplay: Steven Zaillian, based on the book by Jonathan Harr. Producers: Scott Rudin, Robert Redford and Rachel Pfeffer. Director: Steven Zaillian. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, profanity) Running Time: 118 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
For those unfamiliar with the American legal system -- and count it among your blessings if you are one of them -- it is not generally the stuff of which great drama is made. It is a thing of motions, pleadings, depositions and causes of action, of hundreds of hours spent reading thousands of incoming documents, or redacting thousands of outgoing documents. It is a war of attrition played out in conference rooms, only rarely involving tense attorney-witness confrontations or even-more-tense waits for a verdict. Cinematic law is a satisfying fiction; real law is, for the most part, a laborious game of chicken before an out-of-court settlement.
A CIVIL ACTION's dubious merit involves the extent to which it effectively captures real law. It's based on a real case, recounted in Jonathan Harr's non-fiction best-seller about Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta), a Boston personal injury lawyer with a gift for turning the "s" in "suffering" into a dollar sign. He sees no such dollar signs in a case brought in by his partner Kevin Conway (Tony Shalhoub), a case involving a statistically significant cluster of children dying of leukemia in the town of Woburn...that is, until he discovers that the toxic chemicals in the area just may be spilling out of the deep pockets of R.W. Grace Corp. and Beatrice Foods. Schlichtmann smells a killing, and the Woburn case comes to consume everything he has and everything he is.
There was every reason to believe that, if anyone could lend a spark to slogging through the legal mire, it would be Steven Zaillian. This was, after all, the director who made chess both kinetic and poetic in SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER. Indeed, there are several scenes in which Zaillian nails the harsh truths of tort law: Schlichtmann coldly ticking off the relative cash values of women vs. men or black vs. white in wrongful death cases; a hilarious courtroom moment in which a corporate defense attorney realizes he's lost the jury's sympathy before he's even begun; an effective montage showing the mounting costs of research and expert witnesses. A CIVIL ACTION pulls few punches when it comes to underlining a process that's always about money, and only accidentally about justice.
Unfortunately, it pulls all its punches when it comes to giving the story an emotional hook. Schlichtmann's conversion from shark to softy is supposed to anchor the film, except that it's far too subtle. In fact, Travolta often plays Schlichtmann as though his concern is always still about the money, his frustration less about letting his clients down than about letting the big one slip away -- which, frankly, is a more interesting choice. Those clients, meanwhile, remain stoic, heroic abstractions, the working class American equivalent of the struggling non-white characters who serve as background color in stories of a wealthy white character's awakening to social conscience (like SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET). As the film slowly becomes the story of how the Woburn case drains all the cash out of Schlichtmann and his firm, it slowly drains what little narrative and visual energy it had.
Certainly much of that energy was supposed to be provided by Robert Duvall as Jerry Facher, Beatrice's eccentric veteran attorney. I suppose the idea is that he's wily because he passes himself off as such a goof, but the character's tics -- taping up an ancient briefcase covered in Snagglepuss decals; absently bouncing a ball during a phone conversation; obsessing over the Red Sox -- are more often distracting than they are entertaining. At least Duvall's fussy colorfulness, along with William H. Macy's less-mannered breakdown as Schlichtmann's nervous accountant, give you something to watch. Too often A CIVIL ACTION feels like the sort of lecture in legal maneuvering we see Facher give to students at Harvard Law. It runs out of gas when it runs out of things to tell us, since it lacks characters to engage us. Real law makes the appeal of John Grisham-esque courtroom melodrama make a lot more sense.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 punitive damages: 5.
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