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With a few notable exceptions, courtroom films turn into detective stories around the halfway mark, and most of them are also narratives of last-ditch redemption for the defense laa?er or litigator hero. (Stories about prosecutors, on the other hand, tend to be sentimental educations.) From Paul Newman jimmying open the mailbox and regaining his respectability in The Verdict to Joe Pesci studying the tire tracks and winning Marisa Tomei's hand in My Cousin Vinny, the uniformity is breathtaking given the high quotients of boredom. fatigue, calculation, and utter tedium involved in the preparation and execution of any legal proceeding. Occasionally, our more ambitious and civic-minded filmmakers attempt to dramatize the legal process itself; John Sturges's The People Against O'Hara is an early example, and Lumet's police/courtroom hybrids have gone the farthest in striking a satisfying balance between dramatic involvement and honest portrayal.
With A Civil Action, Steve Zaillian hits a bit of a sophomore slump after his pungent, exciting Searching for Bobby Fischer. His new, higher-profile offering has all of that film's virtues (crystal-clear sense of character and dramatic incident, handsome and uncluttered visual presentation, an interesting feel for puffed-up males butting heads) save one: thematic concision. To his credit, Zaillian comes at the reallife drama of Jan Schlichtmann and his class action lawsuit against two major corporations from all sides - the litigators, the defense lawyers, the judge, the parents of the children who have died of leukemia, the corporations whose subsidiaries have been dumping toxic solvents near the town water supply, the reluctant witnesses. And for the first half of...