A Civil Action Reflection

A Civil Action, written by Steven Zaillan and Jonathan Harr, is a movie about Jan Schlichtmann, a rich and self-centered personal-injury lawyer who is asked by the small town of Woburn to help them with their biggest problem ever. One mother named Anne Anderson lost her young son because of the contaminated water in their town. She called Jan while he was on a radio show once, and he, of course, said that he would definitely help the small town of Woburn with this problem. However, he didn’t really mean that. This is the point where the plot begins. I liked this film. It showed how one extremely over-paid and self-centered lawyer could be changed by such a small and almost meaningless town. Jan did a complete turn-around: he went from not caring about the families that had lost members (because of the water) to only caring about them, and nothing else, not even his money or his law firm collapsing underneath his feet. It was very effective in getting this point across. The characters played their parts very well, and made a huge amount of emotional appeals, to try to get the audience to actually feel the pain this town was going through. I think that emotional appeals always help someone get their points across to an audience because they make us think about people and experiences that we’ve had that dramatically changed our lives.


There were many dramatic aspects to this film, but I think two that most average people notice the most is actors and lighting. They are probably the two that audiences pay the most attention to. The first things you see, is the actors. But, you might not even see the actors if the lighting is very dim or very light. So I think the lighting plays an important role in films as well as everything else that makes it what it is. First of all, the casting for this movie was all chosen excellently. For example, John Travolta playing the part of Jan was perfect. He definitely can look like a self-centered personal injury lawyer, because of him looks and how good he is at acting rich and egoistic. Another example of extremely good casting is Robert Duvall playing Jerome Facher. In this movie, Duvall plays a kind-of ‘bad guy’ almost. I think he plays it well, and that he enjoys being the villain and crushing Jan Schlictmann’s dreams of winning the case against Beatrice. As a last example, Anne Anderson is played well by Kathleen Quinlan. She’s sort-of a deep person one might say, and she plays a character that fits her personality. I’d say that Anne’s character was soft-spoken, thoughtful, sweet, and definitely not self-centered. She is, in some ways, the opposite of Jan Schlictmann. The second important dramatic aspect of this film is the lighting. One good example of lighting in this film is when Jan and his partners at law are sitting in their ‘office’ with every light off except for a small lamp on the reception desk. This is when there are movers coming in to take all their stuff away because they need to get all the money out of it as they possibly can. All the lights being out in the office of the law firm is a really good choice of lighting because it shows how the lights have “gone out” in the hearts of the other attorneys in Jan’s law firm. Jan is the only one left that still has some hope of winning this case. Everyone else, especially James Gordon (their financial advisor) wants to just give up the case because they think that with no money left, no other employees besides the 3 attorneys and a secretary, there is no way to win the case. So they might as well just give up on it entirely. The lighting shows the audience all of this information by just being really dim. It was a good choice.


There are also cinematic aspects to every film. Two very important ones are photography and camera movement, because they give the movie lots of dimension and make it interesting to watch. One scene in the movie is good because it pans the site of the excavating and digging by the geologists Jan hired. Jan is walking by the work site and talking to Jerome Facher at the same time, so the camera pans their conversation, but behind them, the panning allows the audience to see just how big a project it is to figure out what chemicals were where at one time. There were other places where photography and camera movement were used, and they made the movie more interesting than if every shot was a still, medium shot just of people talking to each other. Another important one is editing, which also makes many movies more interesting than if all the shots were the exact same duration. I really liked how when in the end, Jan was realizing something about the case. It was as if his mind was constantly thinking back to things that had happened during the case for that brief two or three minutes of the movie. It was a really good use of editing because it left the audience wondering what Jan was thinking about and why all those little clips from earlier in the movie were so important. We don’t know what’s going on in Jan’s mind at this point in the movie, but we’re hooked, so we want to know what he will do with all those little flashbacks and realizations he just had. Sounds and music were used well too. Really classy and fancy classical music was playing in really nice high-end scenes. Like at the Harvard club, when Jan goes to talk to the man that might give him eight million dollars. It is a fancy place where a lot of rich people go, so they play music that very wealthy and smart people will know and appreciate. All these cinematic aspects of film make movies more interesting and much more fun to watch.


A Civil Action is much like the play All My Sons, in some ways. They both deal with ethical dilemmas that have to do with innocent people dying if they make a certain move. They both have a protagonist that is self-centered in the beginning and then changes at the end. Like Joe, the protagonist of All My Sons, he starts out by defending himself by saying that money and a successful business was more important than protecting the lives of twenty-one innocent pilots. Then he changed, and realized that what he did was completely wrong (in his opinion) and he had no other choice but to shoot himself on the last page of the play. He is like Jan because in the beginning, we see just how self- centered he is and how he wants to do anything but take on the Woburn case. The only reason he took it on was because the two defendants were Beatrice Foods and Grace Chemicals, two very large corporations that would get Jan a lot of money if he won the case. He took on the case because of his selfishness. But, in the end, he changes and money becomes less important to him than the families of Woburn. The only way that A Civil Action and All My Sons differ is that whatever Joe does now, it won’t change anything that happened. It was in the past, almost ten years ago, and he can’t change what he did then. But, Jan can influence what might happen in the future in the town of Woburn. If he wins the case and becomes able to clean the chemicals up, then no more innocent and helpless citizens of Woburn will die because of contaminated water.


A Civil Action was a good movie. I really enjoyed it, however some people might not like it. it was a kind-of political and law case thriller. Some people might not like this kind of film, but I think that these kinds of films are really interesting. But, if people like ethical dilemmas mixed into a political thriller, then they should definitely see it. the main reason I liked it was because Jan was changed so much by a small, simple and not wealthy town. His life changed completely by the end of the film. He’s in bankruptcy court, and the judge is asking him where all his assets went. But instead of using the word assets, or belongings, or money, she used the term “things by which we measure one’s life by.” I think this was the wrong phrase to use. This is because Jan doesn’t measure his life by material things anymore. He measures his life by the people you change and the things you do to help society. What are the things you measure your life by?