Class Action
By Roger Ebert
- It's a strange thing about the coming attractions trailers
they show before a movie comes out. Most of them promise more than the movie
delivers. Michael Apted's "Class Action" is an exception; the
trailer seems to promise a formula plot - a father and his daughter, both
lawyers, on opposing sides in court, trading legal arguments and cliches.
The movie is indeed about the father and the daughter, but in ways we didn't
anticipate, with surprising intelligence and empathy.
- The movie stars Gene Hackman as an aging radical who shaped
his politics in the 1950s (he proposed to his wife after spotting her
mouthing "McCarthy is a weasel" in the gallery during the
Army-McCarthy hearings). He specializes in defending underdogs and attacking
the establishment. His daughter, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, is a
child of more materialist decades, and wants to become a partner in a big
corporate law firm. Father and daughter find themselves on opposing sides in
a case involving a giant automaker whose 1985 wagons have an unfortunate
tendency to explode.
- If that were all there was to the screenplay, "Class
Action" would no doubt march down familiar corridors worn smooth by
countless other movies about the law. But this is a very particular movie,
where the details about the lawsuit are secondary to an ethical struggle
that takes place between father and daughter. He believes she has sold out
to heartless big business. She believes he is a showboating hypocrite who
stuck up for the little guy, all right, but mostly for self-aggrandizement,
while meanwhile he was cheating on her mother and discarding former clients
who needed him.
- Both of them are right, and both of them are flawed, and
the movie is about the inexact process by which both characters are able to
forgive, and change. That's what's interesting about it - that, and the
surprising power of the performances, not only from the leads but also from
Joanna Merlin as Hackman's wife, who long ago made her accommodation with
his faults; Donald Moffat, as the taciturn, utterly pragmatic head of the
giant law firm; Jan Rubes as an aging engineer who is sure he remembers all
the important things, and Colin Friels as a corporate lawyer who is both
Mastrantonio's supervisor and her lover. Hackman is wonderful (one is
tempted to add "of course"). But Mastrantonio is really at the
center of the film, and supports it with fierce energy. She has quiet
authority and projects both her character's strong self-image and deepest
resentments; this is a grown-up portrait of a woman still growing up.
- The screenplay by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames and
Samantha Shad contains dialogue scenes so well-heard and written it's hard
to believe this is a Hollywood movie, with Hollywood's tendency to have
characters underline every emotion so the audience won't have to listen so
carefully. There's a scene, for example, where father and daughter are
preparing dinner together, and their civility gradually collapses into anger
and tearful recrimination. And other scenes, deliberately of few words, in
which lawyers try to say things without saying them - to imply what must be
done, without being trapped into actually issuing unethical orders.
- The details involving the exploding gas tanks are, in a
way, the least important parts of the film, although they're sure to gladden
Ralph Nader. What I liked best was the way the whole legal case and all of
its twists and turns were used to force the Hackman and Mastrantonio
characters into learning things about themselves. Apted is a director whose
films have often been about people in a process of self-discovery (his
credits include "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Continental
Divide," "Gorillas in the mist" and the great continuing
documentary "28up"), and that's what this film is really about,
and why it's so much more interesting than the ads might have you believe.
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