Civil Law
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David v. Goliath: films depicting civil disputes
often show the small-time, solo-practitioner
attorney taking on the big corporate law firm.
We see big firms practice greedy, unethical,
even illegal behavior and drag out cases to
bleed their cash-strapped opponents who
often work on a contingency-fee basis (they
only get paid if they win).
Discovery: during the pre-trial phase of a
case, both sides are supposed to exchange
all the information each has on the case.
While this is meant to encourage settlement,
it also leads to lengthy delays. Lengthy
discovery is often difficult for plaintiff’s
attorneys who work on contingency fees and
enrich defendant’s attorneys who bill by the
hour. Hence defendant’s attorneys routinely
submit a blizzard of documents in hopes of
overwhelming their opponents who may
endlessly search in vain for the proverbial
needle in a haystack.
Wither
Workaholics?
• On one level, the film is a critique of excessive work and singleminded focus on career and is therefore critical of the corporate, getahead-at-all-costs, work ethic of the New Right political regime.
• Jed’s excessive devotion causes hurt to those closest to him such as
his wife Estelle and his daughter Maggie as well as his friend
Tagalini.
• Maggie’s desire to climb the corporate ladder and make partner leads
her into an unhealthy relationship with a co-worker and make poor
career choices in the end.
• In this sense, Jed and Maggie are not the opposites they seem to be
at first blush (liberal v. conservative; plaintiff v. defendant; big firm v.
small). The are exactly the same in their focus on career at the
expense of everything else.
Ethics
• What should Maggie have done when she discovered that Michael
destroyed Pavel’s report?
• She could tell her clients about the consequences of destroying evidence
and urge them to supply another report to opposing counsel, consistent the
discovery requirements.
• She could urge her clients to settle the case immediately to avoid a big loss
at trial.
• She could tell the judge what happened.
• She could report the actions of her superiors to the state bar association’s
ethics committee.
• She could take herself off the case.
• She could leave the firm.
• In the end, she chooses to betray her clients by telling opposing counsel
what she knows and undertakes a legal strategy that harms her clients and
her firm.
• In the process, she betrays client loyalty and will probably be disbarred for
violating legal ethics.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as
Maggie Ward
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She is a new San Francisco corporate attorney climbing the ladder to a coveted partnership.
In order to get there, she believes that she has to exhibit phallic power and dominance. To show
sympathy for victims and concern for family would be to exhibit “weak,” liberal, female traits.
As a result, she is miserable and makes bad personal and professional decisions.
Of course her superiors know that she will overcompensate for this and they assign her the job
of defending the automobile corporation against injury claims.
She formally opposes her father in a class action lawsuit and is ordered by her unethical male
superior and lover, Michael, to “play ball” in order to win the case, which he knows she will do.
Maggie’s main concern, however is her father and in a classic feminist position, she conflates
the public and private behavior of her father: “You’re a user, Dad. You used Tagalini [a corporate
whistleblower]. You used all those women, and you used Mom.”
She also conflates the public and private by sleeping with her boss, Michael.
Nick (Lawrence Fishburne), at attorney in Jed’s firm has her completely figured out: “Your
biggest aspiration is to be his mirror image—exactly the opposite of what he is. And the problem
is, you don’t know what he is. That makes being you impossible.”
Maggie is caught in the classic father-daughter Electra (Oedipal) complex of female sexual
development: She kills her mother so that she can replace her in a relationship with the father.
But which “father” will she choose? The image or the mirror-image?
She MUST choose, however, in order to “find herself” as a daughter, woman, and lawyer. Why?
Because the feminist position leaves her unsatisfied (indeed it’s excessive and fueled by her
own insecurities), is antithetical to the corporate environment she works in, and is inconsistent
with her father’s mainstream liberal position.
Female Attorney Protagonists
• Like many of her predecessors in the female
attorney films before Class Action, such as
Jagged Edge, Suspect, Music Box, and The Big
Easy, Maggie is caught within a web of
deception constructed by the male characters
surrounding her.
• Maggie is being used not only by Quinn but also
by her lover Michael, several other male
associates, and later Jed, though this time in the
name of justice.
Father #1:
Gene Hackman as
Jedediah Ward
• Former activist lawyer in the 1960s and 1970s from the People’s
Republic of Berkeley, he represents victims and their families
seriously injured or killed in car accidents involving a defective
model.
• He is the “good” father of corporate attorney Maggie Ward.
• However, his focus on career and fame led to affairs and the
ultimate failure of his marriage and family life. Maggie resents him
for the affairs and thinks he is still at it at the party when she thinks
she sees him hitting on a young associate. As in Adam’s Rib, the
associate is a lesbian and therefore the scene only serves to clarify
the relationship between the main characters.
• Jed plays the role as mediator (father) for Maggie’s agency
(daughter) in personal, professional, and ethical terms.
• He represents the mainstream liberalism of Bill Clinton and other
Democrats attempting to operate in the New Right (conservative)
political regime.
Father #2:
Donald Moffat as
Fred Quinn
• Controlling partner of the corporate firm where Maggie
works.
• He is the “bad” father to Maggie, seducing her into the
high-powered, prestigious, rich, corporate, legal world.
• Quinn represents the New Right conservatism of the
Reagan/Bush I-era when the film was made.
• Moffat made a career of playing attorneys, even the
senior partner, in films like Regarding Henry.
Cinematic Techniques
• Mise-en-scene combines with parallel editing in the first third
of the picture to function as a barometer of Jed’s politically
correct position, against which the film asks us to evaluate
Maggie. Jed speaks of “justice” while Maggie argues the
“law.”
• Numerous courtroom sequences portray Maggie as the
castrating female. With shots composed so that the jury often
is visible, we watch as one elderly male juror, positioned on
the far right of the frame, lowers his head in embarrassment
and sympathy with Dr. Pavel when Maggie attacks his
credibility. This shot, along with several others in which we
see Jed’s reaction from a distance, once again defines
Maggie as a threatening figure.
• Maggie’s imposing class-and-steel firm where lawyers
compete for fast-track cases in contrasted with the warm,
homey, small office of Jed and Nick where they democratically
discuss the rights and safety of “the people.”
Maggie’s Choice
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Why don’t either Maggie or Jed move toward the
mediated position represented by their martyred
mother/wife Estelle?
Female lawyer films routinely set-up dichotomies that
the female protagonists must resolve: public/private;
reason/emotion; law/justice.
This suggests a lack of empowerment as the female
must conform to one stereotype or the other.
Before ultimately aligning herself with the “proper”
patriarch, Maggie threatens to subvert justice
because she is a public agent of law and reason—as
good as any man can do.
Yet she never has any real choice because the
numerous exchanges between her two fathers
demonstrate that men ultimately wield the real power.
Only when she embraces the film’s liberalism does
Maggie achieve a coherent subjectivity in service to
her good father, the film’s true agent of justice.
The picture’s Hollywoodland, happy-ending final shot
is telling: the Oedipal/Electra embrace of her good
father is familiar and comforting to both them and us.
When she refused to dance with him earlier in the
film we were upset! Now, everybody’s happy!
Female Lawyer Films
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There was a huge explosion of female lawyer films in the 1980s
and 1990s. Why?
Hollywood films in general from this period illustrate a crisis of
maleness and patriarchy. One example is the use of female
protagonists in increasing numbers—even in action pictures such
as Aliens and Point of No Return.
Films involving law, and particularly women lawyers, provide
unique opportunities to question patriarchy: male v. female
attorney with “the law” (patriarchy) in dispute.
Yet these films ultimately undermine the feminist critique of
patriarchy. How?
The female lawyer is often positioned to deflect the very analysis of
patriarchal power her existence would seem to prompt: the female
lawyer herself is “put on trial” so to speak, and we question her role
as a woman and a lawyer.
Indeed, continually reminding us that patriarchy and the law are
inseparable, almost all female lawyer films feature patriarchal
figures who possess the potency—the genuine power—to initiate
the female lawyer into he structure of the law, to deny her access,
or to regulate her behavior as she performs within or outside the
courtroom. These men, the films suggest, rightfully “own” the
power of language and the law.
The Paradox
• Hence the paradox: the existence
of a female lawyer is a powerful
feminist critique on patriarchy,
however her ultimate inability to
“measure up” and her choice
between either the “good” or “bad”
father-figures competing to
influence her, exposes a lack of
agency and deeply conservative,
antifeminist underpinnings.
• Radical feminism is co-opted,
watered-down, and replaced by a
“new woman” or “corporate
feminism” which equates liberation
from patriarchy with enlistment in
its ranks—in one form or another.
• Female lawyer films, therefore,
become symptomatic of the very
crisis they wish to submerge.
Credits
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Bergman, Paul and Michael Asimow, “Class Action,” in Reel Justice (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996)
171, 176, 198, 233.
Lucia, Cynthia, Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005).
Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics of Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film
(Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Vintage
Books, 1994).
Tushnet, Mark, “Class Action: One View of Gender and Law in Popular Culture,” John Denvir, ed., Legal Reelism:
Movies as Legal Texts (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996) 244-60.