Film review by Kevin Patterson
A CIVIL ACTION Rating: *** (out of four) PG-13, 1998 Director/Screenplay: Steven Zaillian Starring Cast: John Travolta, Robert Duvall, John Lithgow, William H. Macy
A CIVIL ACTION turned out to be about as good as I had expected, but not in the way I had expected. Based on the previews, what I thought we were going to get was a nice character film about a lawyer who finds himself personally affected by a case for the first time with a considerable amount of courtroom melodrama. Instead, the character development turns out to be kind of thin, but the legal procedure is actually portrayed fairly realistically and without a tidy happy ending.
John Travolta is the star of the film (which is based on a true story) as Jan Schlictmann, a personal injury lawyer While he's not a totally heartless sleazeball, certainly knows the ins and outs of his profession and isn't about to take on a case solely because it's a good cause. There has to be a clear, concrete argument to make that won't cost millions of dollars, and they have to be able to sue someone whose pockets are deep and who will offer a juicy settlement. As we learn from Jan's narration, a personal injury trial rarely comes to an actual verdict: 98.5% of them end in an out-of-court settlement. All a settlement really means, of course, is that the lawsuit is a sufficient inconvenience that the defendant will throw out some money to make it go away, not that they actually admit any wrongdoing.
The trouble is, Jan's latest clients, a group of parents from Woburn, Massachussetts whose children all died due to ill health, want exactly that: an apology. They believe that their children's sickness was a result of improper waste disposal procedures by some local companies which polluted the water supply. At first, Jan is reluctant to take their case, but eventually he agrees and undertakes a costly investigation into the companies' disposal procedures. The problem is that their wishes really have no place in the American legal system, at least not without a much more powerful financial force behind them than Jan's firm. To get an admission of wrongdoing, that means that Jan must prove that the companies were at fault in court, but as he says, this is not the way personal injury trials function: they function by ending early in a settlement.
Writer/director Steven Zaillian wisely avoids getting too heavy-handed with all this: rather than belaboring the obvious cold-heartedness of Jan's opponents, he sends them up with a light, satirical touch. Robert Duvall turns in a good performance as the eccentric and arrogant Jerome Facher, the lawyer who defends one of the corporations. He's certainly cynical and manipulative, yet not really "evil" per se. He's just a world-weary lawyer who knows that a trial is really just about putting on a good show: "justice" has long since ceased to have any real meaning for him. His best scene occurs about halfway through, when Zaillian intercuts his lectures to a law school class with shots of him acting out the strategies he describes in the actual trial. For example, he explains that frequent objections serve to break up the other side's rhythm, as he tells his students, "If you ever catch yourself nodding off in court, the first word out of your mouth when you wake up should be 'objection.'" Then we see Facher himself asleep during the trial, waking suddenly and exclaiming, "Objection!"
The trial, to put it mildly, does not go well. The judge (John Lithgow) nixes some of Jan's defense strategy, and it goes on long enough that he and his partners are more or less run out of business by the legal costs. They even go so far as to sell their own houses and many of their other possessions in order to keep going, but finally they reach a point where they simply cannot continue any longer. Zaillian clearly wants this to be a sort of transformational journey for Jan, but unfortunately he and his partners are not developed very well. His sudden conversion from cynical ambulance-chaser to bona fide crusader for justice happens too quickly. It seems to result from little more than a walk down the river, where he sees that the pollution the parents described probably is taking place, and some serious thought about what it must have been like to lose a child. But didn't he ever give *any* of his other cases this kind of consideration before? What's different about this one that causes him to change his attitude?
A CIVIL ACTION finds only limited success as a character drama, but it makes up for it with its realistic, intelligent plotting and its avoidance of excessive melodrama or an easy ending. It probably isn't one of the best films you'll see, but it's never boring, and you may actually learn a few things about the mechanics of a civil lawsuit in the process.
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