A CIVIL ACTION

Courtroom dramas can be among the most confining, predictable movies. Famed screenwriter Steven Zaillian (SCHINDLER’S LIST and SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER, two of the best movies in recent years) overcomes the limitations of the genre in A CIVIL ACTION, a mesmerizing movie with some of the best acting of the year.

Based on a true story, A CIVIL ACTION stars John Travolta as personal injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, a rich, polished bachelor whose colleagues think can do no wrong. Jan, who also narrates the movie, goes to meet some parents in rural New England, whose children died from leukemia, perhaps by drinking local polluted water. Jan thinks the case will be hard to prove and will not generate much money. When he gets a ticket for speeding near the polluted stream, he finds, however, that the local firms guilty of the pollution are connected to two of America’s largest corporations, Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace & Co.

Seduced by the deep pockets of these companies, Jan and his colleagues file a lawsuit on behalf of the parents. They meet a wily adversary, however, in the form of Beatrice’s lawyer, Jerome Facher, played by Robert Duvall in one of his best performances. Facher teaches law at Harvard. At several points, Facher lectures brilliantly on legal do’s and don’ts while the cutaways to the courtroom shows Jan breaking those very principles of litigation. For example, Facher says that self-pride is the worst enemy a lawyer can have and that pride comes before a fall, but in the courtroom, Jan’s pride gets the better of him because he is upset that the lawyers for the corporations don’t treat he and his colleagues with the respect he thinks they deserve. So Jan asks for an extraordinarily high settlement, which causes the opposition lawyers to leave the room in disgust.

The climax of the movie comes when Facher and Jan have a conversation about the case while the jury is making an important verdict that will decide which company, if any, is liable for damages. Jan tells Facher that the jury will see the truth, but Facher is more realistic and says, “A courtroom is not the place to look for the truth. Truth is at the bottom of a bottomless pit.” The results of this clash of titans is enthralling and ends on a bittersweet note for Jan, who loses all his material possessions in pursuit of justice.

As usually is true for him, Zaillian has written a taut script with a lot of excellent dialogue. His direction is nearly as superb as his directorial masterpiece, SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER, another but more moving film about the price of cutthroat competition. In CIVIL ACTION, Zaillian comes up with wonderful visual descriptions for Jan and Facher’s characters, like Jan’s love of fast cars and Facher’s love of quiet moments of solitude. Zaillian, who is purportedly a Christian, is helped by brilliant characterizations from Travolta and especially Duvall, such as Travolta’s flashy earnestness and Duvall’s cagey wisdom, intelligence, compassion, and controlled anger.

Despite the environmentalism in this movie, which seems colored by a socialist worldview favoring a bloated federal government, A CIVIL ACTION contains some strong moral aspects. Thus, Jan loses all his material possessions to pursue what he feels is a case of right and wrong and social justice. Although the conservative, and some might say Christian, worldview favors the control of local government over public health issues such as drinking water, that worldview also opposes placing concentrated power in big corporations such as Grace and Beatrice, power that turns such companies into the moral and legal equivalent of human beings made in the image of God. Water pollution that endangers the lives of people is clearly wrong, especially when done deliberately as done in the case of the local tannery that is the main villain in this movie. Therefore, Jan’s personal journey of courage and redemption is morally uplifting, though tragic.

A CIVIL ACTION handles all these basic themes in a provocative way. In its own way, it’s like a fine Greek tragedy. Best of all, it keeps the foul language to a real minimum and includes no sexual immorality, nudity or excessive violence.