Boston Personal Injury Attorney
Q._A_Civil_Action_, based on Jonathan Harr's fact-based book, marks the directorial debut of Academy Award-winning screenwriter Zaillian (who also wrote and executive produced), and he displays an effectively economical storytelling style. This is best exemplified in a sequence where Boston personal injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) meets up with Albert Eustis (Sydney Pollack), a pompous executive with the corporation of W.R. Grace & Co., and recounts the encounter to his legal partners. Instead of showing the encounter and then Jan's account of it, they unfold simultaneously through intercutting, with certain behaviors and statements underscored by Jan's after-the-fact commentary. Another example has Jerome Facher, attorney to the large Beatrice Foods corporation, lecturing a class on trial procedure, and each of the bullet points he makes are followed by concrete illustration in the courtroom. The technical proficiency extends to Travolta, who hits the right dramatic notes as Jan, a hotshot attorney who sees dollar signs in representing a group of Woburn, Massachusetts parents in a complaint against Grace and Beatrice. These eight families claim that the two corporations contaminated the town's drinking water, which led to their children's deaths from leukemia. But somewhere along the way, Jan becomes emotionally involved, making his own dollar signs disappear as the impossible case drains his firm's funds but not the energy of his crusade. The problem is that I never got a true sense of that change. The turning point is supposed to be a scene where Jan is driven to tears while thinking about one of the father's stories, but I did not sense any change following that scene; Jan still seemed like the slickster that he was, and his fierce determination to see the case through still seemed motivated by money and not sentiment. Any ideas???
A.Adapted from Jonathan Harr's 1995 non-fiction best-seller, this is a deadly serious legal thriller - it's also a deadly bore. John Travolta sleepwalks through the role of Jan Schlictmann, an egotistical, high-stakes, personal-injury attorney who suddenly becomes virtuous and loses his custom-made shirt when he sues two corporations for dumping toxic waste which may have polluted the water supply and, in turn, caused cancer-related deaths in eight families in a small town outside of Boston. When we first meet Schlictmann, he's driving a sleek black Porche and reveling in minor celebrity. Guesting on a radio talk show, he's confronted by a client (Kathleen Quinlan) whose letters he has ignored. She's the distraught mother of a young boy who died of leukemia and represents seven other children in one neighborhood who met a similar fate. But when Schlictmann discovers that two major companies (W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods) may be the culprits, he gleefully proclaims, "This is a gold mine!" Greedily, he accept the case which, eventually, drives his firm into bankruptcy. Written and directed by Steven Zaillian, who wrote "Schindler's List," it's issue-oriented, earnest and decent, filled with righteous indignation about social injustice. Unfortunately, it's not very entertaining - except for Robert Duvall's superbly nuanced performance as a crafty corporate counsel, Sydney Pollock's turn as a snobbish executive, and an uncredited cameo by Kathy Bates. Why does it miss the mark? Because we have no emotional investment in Travolta's morally ambiguous character. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "A Civil Action" is a bleak, stilted 6, proving that no good deed goes unpunished.
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