A Civil Action isn’t just the tale of an exploiter who develops a conscience – the undeniable Hollywood hook in Zaillian’s script – but also a portrait of a con artist who falls for his own con.

(An ingenious opening describes how his expertly calibrated courtroom theatrics in a personal-injury case drive opposing counsel into begging him to accept a two-million-dollar settlement.) His first impulse is to turn down the Woburn plaintiffs when his partner, Kevin Conway (Tony Shalhoub), votes to take them on. In the movie, Schlichtman begins as a highly skilled ambulance chaser. Zaillian’s film may bowdlerize its subject in the course of streamlining it, but it’s a snappy, ingeniously crafted piece of rabble-rousing dramaturgy – a cross between a Warner Brothers urban potboiler from the thirties and a meaty thesis picture like Twelve Angry Men, which gives a large cast of talented actors plenty to do. Despite its colorful, complicated hero, who becomes so obsessed with the case that he drives his firm into bankruptcy, A Civil Action is an obstacle course for a moviemaker. The book bogs down in the middle – just as the case itself did – in endless scientific testimony, and it never recovers its momentum. But I’m not sure how a filmmaker could remain faithful to Harr’s material and make it dramatic at the same time. The writer-director, Steve Zaillian, takes major liberties with both the narrative and character of Schlichtman (played by John Travolta) he pares down Harr’s long, winding report of the case and shapes it into a melodrama – much as the writers on the TV series The Practice did when they borrowed the story for an arc centered around the firm’s proletarian lawyer, Jimmy Berlutti (Michael Badalucco). If you’re a big fan of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, the 1995 bestseller about how the Boston lawyer Jan Schlichtman forfeited a civil-action suit against two chemical companies, Grace and Beatrice, for polluting the water supply in Woburn, Massachusetts, then the movie adaptation may drive you crazy.

Jonathan harr a civil action 1995