Great Film: A Civil Action
Thankfully not another pretty conversation piece
I'm usually put off by courtroom films simply because I associate them with
either the tendency for pompous and ornate speech-making a la "A Few Good
Men," or cheap audience-manipulation a la "Primal Fear." Yes, they are
entertaining, usually with great actors and fine performances - thinking
man's thrillers. But generally they remain nothing more than that - a
well-done conversation piece.
"A Civil Action" was a pleasant surprise because it is not only like neither
of those films, but also because it is a good film starring John Travolta.
While he had his moments in the spotlight for good reason (think: "Pulp
Fiction") his movies are generally not that great. But that's just a
personal opinion and I may be wrong.
Still, "A Civil Action" is a great courtroom film. For one, it's a true
story (which doesn't necessarily say much), and it is told with restraint,
quietness and respect for the characters involved (which should be saying a
lot). It takes the best from "Silkwood" and "Verdict" and it gives us people
who are real and who engage in battle the way we imagine real people would.
They don't have dramatic moments in the courtroom upon which an unreal
stillness descends so as to be shattered at the end of the speech by the
thunderous sound of unanimous, emotionally-fraught clapping.
John Travolta is great here and so is the rest of the cast, among them
William H. Macy, Kathleen Quinlan, Sydney Pollack, John Lithgow, Stephen Fry
(in a small cameo role), Kathy Bates (in an even smaller cameo role) and the
great Robert Duvall. In the end, it is Duvall who steals the show in his
quiet, unemotional musings, advice-givings and deliberations with Travolta.
He embodies the restraint for which the film strives.
"A Civil Action" is quiet in its proceedings and, consequently real. It
tells the story of a lawyer who reluctantly accepts a case having to do with
the contamination of water and the deaths of many children in a small town
and becomes obsessed with it to the point of going bankrupt. His obsession
mirrors the self-destructiveness of Paul Newman's lawyer in "Verdict," and
it has real results. His adversaries are not evil people, per se (think Jack
Nicholson in "A Few Good Men"), but people who are simply doing their jobs
damn well, defending their interests. We shouldn't expect them to cave in to
pretty speech-making, nor should the jury.
And watching "A Civil Action" we don't and it doesn't. The personalities
clash, personal tragedy is pitted against financial burdens of the legal
process, and it yields startling conclusions about the American Justice
system. And that is what "A Civil Action" chooses to focus on more so than
the true story it tells (though it doesn't ignore it either). The film shows
the price of justice and how justice is understood in the legal process. In
fact, it draws a very fine dichotomy between non-legal justice and legal
justice and shows how hard it is to get "justice" in a legal setting.
Needless to say, it becomes a very expensive ordeal full of
re-interpretations of the law and annoying manipulations of it. What we can
gather from the story, however, is that we should be grateful for people who
are willing to go to extreme lengths, at great personal cost, to define
justice on their own terms and to fight for it.
Cast
- Neil Jacobs played by Peter Jacobson
- Jerome Facher played by Robert Duvall
- Al Love played by James Gandolfini
- Jan Schlichtmann played by John Travolta
- Kevin Conway played by Tony Shalhoub
- James Gordon played by William H. Macy
- Bill Crowley played by Zeljko Ivanek
