It’s only a movie.
The time-honored saw that helped get many a child through the scary parts could just as well apply to the way law is practiced on-screen.
Negotiating a settlement between aggrieved parties, the way most business and personal disputes are resolved, pales in dramatic comparison to battling it out before a jury especially when a key witness breaks down on the stand.
“Trials are very exciting and they make wonderful dramatic material, so cases go to trial in movies,” said Michael Asimow, co-author “Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies” (Andrews McMeel, 1996) and a professor at UCLA School of Law. “A full trial that goes to a jury decision is rare. But you’d never guess that from watching lawyer movies.”
Hollywood long has been drawn to the courtroom drama, but few have taken on the less-dramatic settlement conference. Those that have generally take a less than realistic approach, such as 1993’s “Malice,” last year’s “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Verdict,” the classic 1982 feature starring Paul Newman.
Newman plays Frank Galvin, a down-and-out alcoholic lawyer who represents a woman in a coma as a result of her hospital treatment during childbirth. The malpractice and negligence case he can make against the Catholic hospital looks to be a sure thing for a hefty settlement. Indeed, the manner in which the hospital’s lawyers calculate that Galvin’s weak trial record will make for a quick disposition is very much the sort of process plaintiffs and defendants go through in real-life.
But when Galvin passes on the offer without talking to his client, the movie begins its departure from reality.
“‘The Verdict’ is one that lawyers typically like,” said Lincoln Bandlow, an associate at Leopold Petrich & Smith in Los Angeles. “But it wasn’t accurate in the sense that the lawyer turned down a settlement on his own, right in the meeting with the Archbishop (that ran the hospital). He’d be disbarred for that.”
A settlement negotiation actually provides the catalyst for the dark tale of betrayal in “Malice.”
Alec Baldwin, playing brilliant but reckless surgeon Jed Hill, was drunk during a procedure in which he removed the ovaries of a friend’s wife, leaving her unable to have children. The couple seeks millions of dollars in damages, and under aggressive questioning from the woman’s lawyer in the crucial settlement scene, Hill lapses into a monologue in which he says that people don’t pray to God when their loved ones are in surgery, they pray to him. “I am God,” he concludes.
The tirade convinces defense lawyers that a trial is not winnable and results in a $20 million payment.
The settlement scene in “Malice” notwithstanding, such meetings generally get little screen time because there is often the perception that settling means selling out, trading justice for cash.
In truth, said Asimow, settlements offer a better application of justice.
“Trials are a manifestation of a failed settlement process,” he said. “The message in these films is that there’s something corrupt in taking a settlement. The ‘day in court’ sounds glamorous, but there’s nothing nice about it. It’s incredibly costly if you have to pay a lawyer, and the results, when it involves injuries, can be arbitrary and probably won’t be satisfying. A settlement can provide compensation that can actually help your damages and it punishes the defendant.”
Like cops, firefighters, and almost every ethnic group, lawyers can find much to gripe about when it comes to how they are portrayed on screen.
“I don’t expect lawyers can ever be pleased by the accuracy of their portrayal in films, no more than Native Americans or Italian Americans,” said Henry Sheehan, a film critic for KPCC-FM (89.3) and president of the Los Angeles Association of Film Critics. “It’s just not what filmmakers do.”
Whether the lawyer is the villain or the hero is more a function of what side he or she is on. “The legal system is now the street outside the barroom where the sheriff and the villain have their big showdown, and the lawyer can be the bandit or the sheriff,” Sheehan said.
