Based on the non-fiction book by Jonathan Harr, Steven Zaillian’s A CIVIL ACTION is a vastly underrated & one of the most overlooked movies of 90s. An impeccably-written, deceptively complex and largely cliché-resistant courtroom procedural drama and a powerful moral fable, it holds up better than any of those Grisham adaptations. John Travolta sinks his teeth into one of his best roles, and he and a heavy-hitting supporting cast, including the great Robert Duvall, take Zaillian's brilliant script & nuanced dialogue and knock the ball right out of the park. Also James Gandolfini has never turned in a bad performance, even in a small role he can't help but steal a movie.
A forgotten and expensive 90s courtroom drama by Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who beat both Mann’s The Insider and Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich to addressing a similar real-life situation of regular people suffering the legal consequences of simply resisting corporations deliberately poisoning them, in this case via an adaptation of Jonathan Harr’s best-selling exposé on the suspicious uptick of leukemia among residents of Woburn, Massachusetts due to chemicals being dumped into their drinking water. I love this specific subgenre of legal thriller (where there’s a focus on mundane procedure and the realization of corruption isn’t melodramatic but a slow-acting poison effect) that even just a fairly familiar and solid one like this works for me. Unfortunately, I don’t think Zaillian ever quite gets to the psychological depth or expressiveness of Mann, nor the moodier and bleaker places in visually/tonally depicting this environment that you’d see in things like Michael Clayton or Dark Waters, and I do think he gets a little cute with some of the eccentric character writing, especially of Travolta’s sleazy personal injury attorney whose arc of going from smirking heartless professional to sentimental believer in the cause is laid on a bit thick. Otherwise though, all the scenes of character actors talking case minutia in lavish rooms (and plotting out their detective case-building moves/countermoves to bring justice to this working class community) is very handsomely photographed by legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall, it does feature some genuinely fantastic supporting performances that help carry it along (Robert Duvall’s strangely behaved but surprisingly skilled rival lawyer, James Gandolfini’s angry and regretful blue collar whistleblower), and Zaillian’s slick, meat-and-potatoes directing style is suited just fine for turning all the script’s observations on the nature of navigating technical strategy in the flawed legal system (and how analysis of risk and manipulation is of more value than to a case than morality or truth) into something consistently engaging and watchable. “The perfect victim is a white male professional, 40 years old, at the height of his earning power, struck down in his prime. And the most imperfect? Well, in the calculus of personal injury law, a dead child is worth the least of all.” Unrelated to any of that, nearly died laughing at the Talking Heads credit song choice. Full discussion on ep 381 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.
