A Film Canon

If the writerliness of courtroom drama makes it a peculiarly fitting vehicle for screenwriters-turned-directors, then Jonathan Harr's 1995 memoir, A Civil Action, provides screenwriter and director Steven Zaillian with an even more striking opportunity. In effect, Harr's memoir maps out a conversion experience, describing how a contaminated water case changed his priorities and redefined his conception of personal injury law. What's most striking, narratively, is the extent to which personal injury law, at least as Harr understands it, is about not going to trial, with the the result that Zaillian's adaptation plays as a settlement drama much more than a courtroom drama. Bookended by the defence's motion that there isn't even enough evidence to go to trial at all, and Jan Schlichtmann's (John Travolta) - Harr's surrogate - final realisation that he can only serve his client by passing the brief on to a wealthier law firm, the vast majority of the film takes place around tables, rather than in court, while even the court scenes are brief, shot more in the spirit of a montage sequence than a sustained dramatic engagement. As a result, the high rhetoric and machinations of classical courtroom drama are largely elided, or at least relocated to the financial machinations that Schlichtmann's small firm have to perform to keep the case in motion, endlessly and ingeniously finding new sources of credit. Not only does this evoke justice segueing into neoliberal risk management, but it foregrounds written over spoken language, paperwork over performance, with the result that the ensemble cast - astonishing even for a courtroom drama - isn't proportionately charismatic in any immediate or conventional way; less a series of disparate characters than of disparate writing styles and signatures. Travolta is especially suited to Schlitctmann's shmuckiness - which is itself perfectly calibrated against the Harvard schmuckiness of defendant Jerome Facher (Robert Duvall) - while Zaillian beautifully ensures that his epiphanies are never too forced or unbelievable. For the most part, they take place in his car, on the road shoulder, on the way to something that's ostensibly more important, and graft a romantic apprehension of nature onto a burgeoning investigative impulse, positioning personal injury law at the sublime cusp between natural and manufactured risk.