A Civil Action (1998)

Calificación de los usuarios:

6.3/10   

Director:

Steven Zaillian

Escritores (WGA):

Jonathan Harr (book)
Steven Zaillian (screenplay)

Fecha de Lanzamiento:

8 enero 1999 (USA)

Género:

Drama

Frase comercial:

Justice has its price.

Plot:

The families of children who died sue two companies for dumping toxic waste: a tort so expensive to prove, the case could bankrupt their lawyer.

Plot Keywords:

Lawyer | Leukemia | Lawsuit | Settlement | Toxic Waste

Premios:

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 5 wins & 8 nominations

Comentarios de los usuarios:

Thankfully not another pretty conversation piece

Reparto

John Travolta	...	Jan Schlichtmann
Robert Duvall	...	Jerome Facher
Tony Shalhoub	...	Kevin Conway
William H. Macy	...	James Gordon
Zeljko Ivanek	...	Bill Crowley
Bruce Norris	...	William Cheeseman
John Lithgow	...	Judge Walter J. Skinner
Kathleen Quinlan	...	Anne Anderson
Peter Jacobson	...	Neil Jacobs
Mary Mara	...	Kathy Boyer
James Gandolfini	...	Al Love
Stephen Fry	...	Pinder
Dan Hedaya	...	John Riley
David Thornton	...	Richard Aufiero
Sydney Pollack	...	Al Eustis

También conocida como:

Acción civil (Spain) [es]
Una acción civil (Argentina) [es]

MPAA:

Rated PG-13 for some strong language.

Duración:

115 min

País:

USA

Idioma:

Inglés

Color:

Color

Relación de Aspecto:

1.85 : 1

Sonido:

DTS | Dolby Digital | SDDS

Clasificación:

USA:PG-13 (certificate #36309) | Iceland:L | South Korea:12 | Philippines:PG-13 | Argentina:13 | Australia:M (original rating) | Australia:PG (TV rating) | Chile:14 | Finland:K-12 | France:U | Germany:12 (w) | Norway:7 | Peru:14 | Portugal:M/12 | Spain:T | Switzerland:7 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:7 (canton of Vaud) | UK:15 | Singapore:PG

Locaciones de Filmación:

Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Compañía:

Touchstone Pictures

Trivialidades:

Steven Zaillian adapted the screenplay with nobody else but 'Robert Duvall (I)' in mind for the role of Jerome Facher.

Errores:

Continuidad: Towards the end of the movie, the newspaper that Anne is holding flips over and back again between shots.

Citas:

Jan Schlichtmann: It's like this. A dead plaintiff is rarely worth more than a living severely-maimed plaintiff. However, if it's a long slow agonizing death as opposed to a quick drowning or car wreck, the value can rise considerably. A dead adult in his 20s is generally worth less than one who is middle aged...

Conexiones de Película:

Apareció en The 56th Annual Golden Globe Awards (1999) (TV)

Banda de Sonido:

Hard Workin' Man

Thankfully not another pretty conversation piece

I'm usually put off by courtroom films simply because I associate them with either the tendency for pompous and ornate speech-making a la "A Few Good Men," or cheap audience-manipulation a la "Primal Fear." Yes, they are entertaining, usually with great actors and fine performances - thinking man's thrillers. But generally they remain nothing more than that - a well-done conversation piece.

"A Civil Action" was a pleasant surprise because it is not only like neither of those films, but also because it is a good film starring John Travolta. While he had his moments in the spotlight for good reason (think: "Pulp Fiction") his movies are generally not that great. But that's just a personal opinion and I may be wrong.

Still, "A Civil Action" is a great courtroom film. For one, it's a true story (which doesn't necessarily say much), and it is told with restraint, quietness and respect for the characters involved (which should be saying a lot). It takes the best from "Silkwood" and "Verdict" and it gives us people who are real and who engage in battle the way we imagine real people would. They don't have dramatic moments in the courtroom upon which an unreal stillness descends so as to be shattered at the end of the speech by the thunderous sound of unanimous, emotionally-fraught clapping.

John Travolta is great here and so is the rest of the cast, among them William H. Macy, Kathleen Quinlan, Sydney Pollack, John Lithgow, Stephen Fry (in a small cameo role), Kathy Bates (in an even smaller cameo role) and the great Robert Duvall. In the end, it is Duvall who steals the show in his quiet, unemotional musings, advice-givings and deliberations with Travolta. He embodies the restraint for which the film strives.

"A Civil Action" is quiet in its proceedings and, consequently real. It tells the story of a lawyer who reluctantly accepts a case having to do with the contamination of water and the deaths of many children in a small town and becomes obsessed with it to the point of going bankrupt. His obsession mirrors the self-destructiveness of Paul Newman's lawyer in "Verdict," and it has real results. His adversaries are not evil people, per se (think Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men"), but people who are simply doing their jobs damn well, defending their interests. We shouldn't expect them to cave in to pretty speech-making, nor should the jury.

And watching "A Civil Action" we don't and it doesn't. The personalities clash, personal tragedy is pitted against financial burdens of the legal process, and it yields startling conclusions about the American Justice system. And that is what "A Civil Action" chooses to focus on more so than the true story it tells (though it doesn't ignore it either). The film shows the price of justice and how justice is understood in the legal process. In fact, it draws a very fine dichotomy between non-legal justice and legal justice and shows how hard it is to get "justice" in a legal setting. Needless to say, it becomes a very expensive ordeal full of re-interpretations of the law and annoying manipulations of it. What we can gather from the story, however, is that we should be grateful for people who are willing to go to extreme lengths, at great personal cost, to define justice on their own terms and to fight for it.