A Civil Action (1998) 3 1/2 stars out of 4
Jan Schlichtmann is a personal injury lawyer - an ambulance chaser. He's the kind of lawyer you think about when you hear those anti-attorney jokes.
He is head of a small firm. He is rich and successful.
And his quest for the truth is the plot of the engrossing courtroom drama, A Civil Action.
Some lawyers have compared a trial to high drama, to theater. That may be when sitting in a courtroom and following a case.
But watching one on the screen is a different matter. If you bog the audience down in too much legalese, it becomes bored. If you spend too much time delving into the personal lives of the protagonists, or toss in a corny love story, than the drama in the courtroom becomes secondary.
A few films have hit the right combination: Anatomy of a Murder, Inherit the Wind, Philadelphia and, now, A Civil Action.
The movie, set in the 1980s, is based on a true case in Schlichtmann, representing eight families from Woburn, Mass., takes on two corporate giants, W.R. Grace & Co. and Beatrice Foods. The families claim that the companies contaminated their town's drinking water with chemicals and this ultimately led to the leukemia deaths of their children.
John Travolta gives a splendid performance as Schlichtmann. At first he is insincere, arrogant and self-centered. He cares nothing about the Woburn families and tries to dump the case.
But when he realizes who he can sue and dreams of the money he can collect, he changes his mind.
Schlichtmann later has a metamorphosis, caring little about the money, only wanting to seek the truth. As one of his clients tells him, the case isn't about money. All the families want is an apology, for someone to accept the responsibility for the wrongdoing that claimed innocent lives.
At this stage, Travolta conveys the single-minded determination and stubbornness that costs Schlichtmann his friends, his house and, ultimately, his career.
Travolta's lawyer walks that narrow rope between obsession and tenacity.
Backing Travolta is a fine supporting cast, most notably Robert Duvall, as Jerome Facher, the soft-spoken, but steel-minded attorney representing Beatrice Foods.
The only problem with Duvall's character lies in the way he is written, not in Duvall's performance. Writer-director Steve Zaillian (who wrote the Oscar-winning Schlinder's List and wrote and directed the little-seen, but exceptional Searching for Bobby Fischer) gives Facher too many quirks. He carries around an old, battered briefcase. He takes pens from other lawyers' offices. He's obsessed with the Boston Red Sox, and on and on. Zaillian, who adapted Jonathan Harr's best-selling book, probably could have made Facher just as interesting without so many eccentricities.
William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub (who was so solid in The Siege) and Zeljko Ivanek (best known as prosecutor Danvers on TV's Homicide: Life on the Streets) portray Schlichtmann's partners who, at first believe in his crusade, later recognize the toll it is taking on their professional and personal lives and force their partner to confront his obsession.
Zaillian's writing and direction is crisp without being flamboyant. With the help of his editor, Wayne Wahrman, he has created some enthralling sequences. Zaillian cross cuts between Facher, who teaches law at Harvard, explaining to his class how cases are won and lost, to the courtroom where Schlichtmann makes some of the very legal errors that Facher is describing.
Always object, Facher tells his students, because it throws off the rhythm of the opposition. "If you fall asleep in court, the first thing you say when you awake is ..." and the scene cuts to Facher dozing in the courtroom, quickly awakening and shouting "Objection."
A Civil Action, at a little under two hours, is an engrossing movie, made moreso by being based on fact. But it is more than the story of legal manueverings or even the search for the truth.
It's the story of one man discovering his true values and setting right his moral compass.
Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, Ind. He can be reached by e-mail at bloom@journal-courier.com or at cbloom@iquest.net
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