Boston Personal Injury Lawyers
Q."I can appreciate the theatrical value of several dead kids," muses personal injury lawyer Jan Schlictmann (John Travolta) early in the legal thriller, "A Civil Action." To its credit, the film, based on Jonathan Harr's nonfiction bestseller, carefully avoids exploiting the death of those children. In fact, the production successfully navigates around most of the rampant emotional manipulation and storytelling clichés that fuel so many courtroom dramas. Unfortunately, in their determination to recount a complicated series of events accurately and without emotional button-pushing, the filmmakers undercut the inherent drama of their own story. "A Civil Action" is admirable and quite interesting, but not nearly as compelling as it should be. Writer/director Steven Zaillian does a nice job of compressing a very complex true story into a manageable package. A series of well-staged deposition scenes lay out the particulars of the case, while voice-overs and sharp editing effectively detail the legal tactics. Early on, we learn that in the world of personal injury law, settling out of court means everything. Only 1.5% of the cases ever reach a verdict, and, out of those, the result is two to one against the plaintiff. For the most part, "A Civil Action" minimizes the human factor of the tragedy, focusing instead on the high-stakes pissing war between the lawyers. Schlichtmann becomes obsessed on extracting as much money from the corporations as possible, turning down huge proposed settlements because the figures were offered too easily.
A.For those unfamiliar with the American legal system -- and count it among your blessings if you are one of them -- it is not generally the stuff of which great drama is made. It is a thing of motions, pleadings, depositions and causes of action, of hundreds of hours spent reading thousands of incoming documents, or redacting thousands of outgoing documents. It is a war of attrition played out in conference rooms, only rarely involving tense attorney-witness confrontations or even-more-tense waits for a verdict. Cinematic law is a satisfying fiction; real law is, for the most part, a laborious game of chicken before an out-of-court settlement. A CIVIL ACTION's dubious merit involves the extent to which it effectively captures real law. It's based on a real case, recounted in Jonathan Harr's non-fiction best-seller about Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta), a Boston personal injury lawyer with a gift for turning the "s" in "suffering" into a dollar sign. He sees no such dollar signs in a case brought in by his partner Kevin Conway (Tony Shalhoub), a case involving a statistically significant cluster of children dying of leukemia in the town of Woburn...that is, until he discovers that the toxic chemicals in the area just may be spilling out of the deep pockets of R.W. Grace Corp. and Beatrice Foods. Schlichtmann smells a killing, and the Woburn case comes to consume everything he has and everything he is.
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