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Film Analysis: A Civil Action

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The movie A Civil Action (Steven Zaillian, 1998) is about 12 children who die from leukemia over a 15 year span. The parents of the deceased victims seem to believe that the local tanneries caused their children to get sick from the well water provided in their community being poisoned by the toxic chemicals poured into the ground from these companies. Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) is a personal injury lawyer from Boston who has an ignorant attitude and only cares about the profit he’ll win back from the cases he takes on. One evening when receiving incoming calls on his radio show a woman named Anne calls in asking Jan when he is going to establish who was responsible for the deaths of the children. He declines after meeting with them since …show more content…

They are aware that what they are doing is wrong but they don’t really seem to care because the risk is worth the reward and they could care less about these small towns and what happens to the people in them. For example GRACE admits to Jan when he goes directly to the NYC Corporation that his disposal of chemicals is incorrect but he is not going to take a hit on his company to admit it because the media will destroy …show more content…

Money was a huge motif of the whole movie. Every decision made came down to how the profit would be affected. For example why the companies wouldn’t own up to the incorrect disposal of poison was because of money or why Jan wouldn’t originally take the case was because he felt as though it wasn’t a profitable one. This is very problematic for any person, we live in a world that revolves around money and a lot of us don’t care about the people below us because we become greedy and selfish. I also said passion because I feel like Jan’s attitude really went from one end of the spectrum to the other. He starts to have a lot more motivation to help the families then to gain a profit for himself like he used to. He really made a different name for himself going from an arrogant, wealthy lawyer to not having really anything but was all about doing the right thing and supporting the

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