Firmly eschewing the melodramatic contrivances and flashy theatrics of the John Grisham adaptations which come out of Hollywood all too often, the writer-director Steven Zaillian approaches the legal drama of A Civil Action with a subtle precision which establishes a persuasive air of authenticity. Zaillian's approach is unusually low-key for a genre which traditionally stokes up a fireworks display of confrontations and revelations for its dramatic finale.
The downside of this sober treatment is that the film drifts perilously close to dramatic inertia at times when it needs to spark, and despite Zaillian's zealous efforts, it risks sacrificing narrative clarity in its distillation of a convoluted, complex case.
A Civil Action dramatises a shocking, fact-based case in which Jan Schlictmann (played by John Travolta) - a confident, smooth-talking Boston lawyer whose firm specialises in personal injury suits - agrees to act on behalf of eight families in the Massachusetts town of Woburn. Their case is that two of America's largest, most powerful corporations, WR Grace & Co and Beatrice Foods, dumped toxic solvents in the area, contaminating the town's drinking water with chemicals which, they alleged, led to some of their children dying of leukaemia.
Schlictmann's involvement in the case is initially far from philanthropic or concerned: he is embarrassed into taking it on when one of the Woburn residents (Kathleen Quinlan) tackles him during a live radio phone-in show. The deeper he becomes involved, however, the more committed he turns - and the more he stands to lose as the corporations employ all their financial might against the diminishing resources of Schlictmann's company.
At the outset of the case, the real-life Schlictmann invited the author, Jonathan Harr, to be "an observer from within" and granted him complete and unrestricted access to all aspects of the case day by day until the matter finally was resolved in 1990. Harr's best-selling book of the story, A Civil Action, serves as the basis for Steven Zaillian's screenplay for the movie.
The film's shortcomings in terms of clarity and dramatic power are compounded by Zaillian's undue emphasis on the Schlictmann character at the expense of the families who brought the case. It's as if we ought to care more about the huge financial problems which beset his firm as the cost of the case escalates, than about the story's real victims. They are glossed as Schlictmann is fashioned into the David who's facing down the Goliath of Grace and Beatrice.
That said, John Travolta subtly captures the changes in the lawyer as he becomes more and more consumed by the case, and he is handed a wily adversary in the self-important defence lawyer retained by Beatrice Foods and played with steely gravitas by Robert Duvall. The accomplished cast notably includes William H. Macy, John Lithgow, Tony Shalhoub, Zeiljko Ivanek, Sydney Pollack, Dan Hedaya and an uncredited Kathy Bates. The film is effectively lit by Conrad Hall in aptly subdued tones which refect Steven Zaillian's understated direction. Michael Dwyer
High Art (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Inter-linked themes of sex, drugs and photography are explored with perspicacity and sensitivity by Lisa Cholodenko - a former assistant editor for John Singleton, Beeban Kidron and Gus Van Sant - in her first feature as a director, High Art. It marks a vibrant, arresting comeback for Ally Sheedy, cast as a rising talent of the 1980s, who, mirroring Sheedy's own career, seemed to have disappeared from view in the 1990s.
The film co-stars the Australian actress, Radha Mitchell as Syd, a sweet-natured young woman who works at a glossy, pretentious New York-based photography magazine, Frame. Although recently promoted to assistant editor, she is dissatisfied to find that she's still fetching sandwiches and coffee for her editor, and she appears less than content in her relationship with her long-time lover (Gabriel Mann).
Syd seems ripe for change and some excitement in her life, and she finds both by accident. Checking out a leak in her bathroom ceiling, she calls on her upstairs neighbours and becomes thoroughly intrigued by one of them, the enigmatic and reclusive Lucy Berliner, the once revered photographer played by Ally Sheedy. Lucy surrounds herself with a bohemian, coked-out coterie of whom the most strung-out is her lesbian lover, Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a heroin-addicted, faded German film star whose best days, as a member of Fassbinder's troupe, are long gone. When Syd suggests that Lucy embark on a series of photographs for Frame, the idea is embraced by her editor - and Syd finds herself drawn into the physical embrace of Lucy, and contemplating a lesbian relationship for the first time in her life.
Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko observes her characters with a cool dispassion in this sensual, seductive movie which registers as an acute study of exploitation on several levels - in work, in relationships and as a camera object. It is graced by unaffected and affecting performances from the three women at its centre, with the pallid Sheedy putting her Brat Pack past far behind her, Mitchell proving yet again that there can be life after Neighbours, and Clarkson capturing the personification of decadence.
Michael Dwyer
The Faculty (18) General release
It must have seemed like an inspired idea to unite Kevin Williamson, the writer of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer with Raul Rodriguez, director of such cartoonish, knowing fare as El Mariachi and From Dusk Till Dawn, and, as you'd expect, The Faculty is full of references to trash classics of the past, most obviously Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with an unexpected dash of The Breakfast Club thrown in for good measure.
Set in an Ohio high school, the tongue-in-cheek plot concerns an alien take-over of the bodies of the staff and pupils, resisted only by a few of the school's outcasts and dropouts, led by loner Elijah Wood. Along the way, we get some so-so special effects, and in usual Williamson style, characters discoursing learnedly on the genre plot they're enacting (highlighted even more by the pointed casting of Carrie star Piper Laurie and Terminator 2 baddie Robert Patrick). It's all a bit too bland for its own good, presumably with a view towards getting the right certificate in the US, and lacks the wit or energy of previous excursions into similar terrain, such as Brian Yuzna's 1989 shocker, Society.
Hugh Linehan
Spike Lee's critically acclaimed documentary, 4 Little Girls, is one of six feature films to be showcased in a touring programme of US independent productions which plays the IFC for a week from today. Lee's film deals with the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, which caused the deaths of four young girls.
The programme will also feature Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis, an experimental satire on late-20th century anxieties; Bob Gosse's picture of shoplifters played by Henry Thomas and Ronin Tunney in Niagara Niagara; Toni Collete, Lisa Kudrow and Parker Posey as dissatisfied office workers in Jill Spreecher's Clockwatchers; Nick Stahl, Martha Plimpton and Kevin Anderson in the story of a troubled marriage in Tim Blake Nelson's Eye of God; and Hilary Brougher's offbeat science-fiction film, The Sticky Fingers of Time.
Michael Dwyer
