A Civil Action

Director Steven Zaillian does author Jonathan Harr a great injustice with his reductionist film version of Harr's 'A Civil Action'.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 23, 1998 | Why is it that movies about the law almost always look so dark? It's a good bet that if a firm can afford mahogany paneling, it can afford to pay its electric bill. The somber shadowy look has always seemed to imply that there are grave, weighty matters going on here and that, like kids on a school field trip, we should be respectful and pay attention. But it could just as easily be a reflection of the distrust most people feel toward lawyers, the persistent and unfortunate belief that the judicial system is a shark's feeding den. Neither interpretation suits Jonathan Harr's nonfiction book "A Civil Action." Millions of people read Harr's gripping bestseller, but Steven Zaillian may be the only one who didn't understand it. It's not just that Zaillian has simplified the story (it's 500 very detailed pages -- he didn't have much of a choice); it's that he almost wholly ignores Harr's complex portrait of the story's contradictory lawyer hero, Jan Schlictmann (John Travolta), in favor of a clichi that suits the worst caricatures of the profession.

Harr's book tells the story of a lawsuit brought against Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace on behalf of a group of residents in the Boston suburb of Woburn (pronounced Woo-burn) in 1982. The families in the lawsuit had all lost a child to leukemia. They were convinced that something in the town's drinking water, which had for years smelled and looked funny to them, was responsible. The odds against so many kids in such a small geographical cluster contracting leukemia certainly suggested that something was up. The plaintiffs found reason to believe that Beatrice and Grace had been dumping chemicals from plants located perilously near two town wells that had been shut down in 1979 after being found to be contaminated with the industrial solvent TCE (trichloroethylene). (Eventually, the evidence against Beatrice and Grace -- the latter indicted for making false statements to the Environmental Protection Agency -- was so overwhelming that they agreed to share the costs of what would be the biggest and most expensive environmental cleanup ever in New England.)

For all the detail Harr brings to this massively complicated story, it never once bogs down or loses clarity. And in the movie, for a while, Zaillian does a creditable job of compressing it. He's particularly effective during the scenes where the witnesses are giving depositions, allowing his cast to sketch lived-in characters in just a few minutes of screen time. As a Woburn resident who worked at one of the plants, James Gandolfini suggests the resentment of a man who suspects he's been a dupe for his bosses for years. When Grace's lawyer, William Cheeseman (Bruce Norris), says that he should tell the truth because then Grace can do the right thing and clean up the site, Gandolfini flashes the sharpster a mean little won't-get-fooled-again smile. And in the role of one of the parents who lost a child, David Thornton carries off a scene that could easily seem a cheap play for the audience's sympathy. He has to relate how his child stopped breathing and died on the way to the hospital, as he pulled to the side of the highway and tried to revive him. The death of a child can be one of the cheapest ways for a movie to put the squeeze on you, but Thornton gives his speech a plain, moving dignity. Zaillian helps him out with a flashback that consists of a single indelible image: a close-up of a car's blinking caution lights in the breakdown lane on a gray, rainy day. It's also to the director's credit that he begins telling the story after the kids have died, thereby resisting the tears he might have wrung from the stories that open Harr's book.