A Civil Action Film Analysis

A Civil Action is a 1998 film depicting an attorney, Jan Schlichtmann, played by John Travolta, and how he battles it out against two companies that ha accused of dumping toxic and harmful waste into the nearby bodies of water and the ground. The plaintiff of this case is the families that were affected by the dumping of the waste; five families in which a child of theirs died from leukemia, and so Anne Anderson, also a victim, reached out to Schlichtmann to take on this case. The companies Beatrice and W.R. Grace were on the defendant side of the case, with Bill Cheesman, attorney for W.R. Grace, and Jerry Facher, the attorney for Beatrice. In the beginning the case goes smoothly with the plaintiff getting the favor of the judge against Facher’s …show more content…
This infuriated the defendants, causing them to try and get closer to the judge, making the judge to more or less side with the defendants. The judge then gave the jury some questions to make this standstill more fair. After the jury answered the questions, the verdict was that they found Grace to be guilty of throwing waste into the water and ground, and Beatrice not guilty of throwing waste, which means that Beatrice (Facher) was clean to go[1]. Schlichtmann decided to meet with the executive of Grace, Al Eustice, to discuss on how much money to give. Some information to remember, is that the law firm that Schlichtmann worked and owned is practically in debt, they had used all of their money and sold everything to forward investigation on the land that was used to dump waste. They hired an expert team of engineers to handle the investigation, but all they got was little evidence and an empty wallet. Fast forward to Schlichtmann meeting at Grace, Eustis offered eight million, which is what Gordon, the math and money man at the law firm calculated would be enough, but the cocky Schlichtmann decided that it wasn’t