Mark Reviews Movies: CIVIL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 16, 2022

The work being done by Benjamin "Ben" Crump is important. Civil, director Nadia Hallgren's documentary about the lawyer, pretty much stops at that observation.

In recent years, Crump has come to some prominence due to his representation of the families of Black men and women who have been killed by the police. He is not a criminal attorney but, as the title makes clear, a civil one, and the logic of his legal strategy is depressingly sound. A key way to further achieve civil rights in the United States, he argues, is to make it financially untenable for police departments across the country to use excessive, deadly, and often unjustified force—especially when it comes to the way cops deal with Black people.

In this country, money talks, and it unfortunately makes a more significant statement than any of those founding or fought-for principles, such as equal protection under the law and the implicit right that no government—or no individual representing one—has the authority to interfere in a citizen's life without some form of due process. The killing of unarmed people by the police is almost certainly the absence of due process and the ultimate form of interference.

All of this should and, almost certainly, is clear to those for whom Hallgren has made this movie. That overt or implicit racial biases make it impossible or difficult for some to see the righteousness of Crump's fight is, of course, a big component of the reason the attorney has to engage in this legal battle in the first place. No documentary—no matter how well the logical or emotional arguments within it may be—will change those minds, and Hallgren more or less dismisses those voices in her movie—giving them (who seem to come from one major cable news network in particular) a brief montage that rushes through their criticisms.

Others critique Crump for making a profit off these high-profile cases, and the attorney himself points out that some of those disapproving sentiments come from Black people. Crump is thoughtful and pragmatic about those criticisms. Most of his cases don't involve police brutality, but the high-profile ones that result in large monetary settlements mean that he and his firm can take on cases that won't make the national news.

Those families are grieving, have been wronged, and are in need of aid, too, and that doesn't even get into the other realms of injustice that Crump confronts. He represented people who had been poisoned by lead in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, and then, there are other instances of discrimination that happen every day that probably won't even make the local newspaper. The money from those more prominent cases ensures that these others can be fought, too.

One such case that's briefly detailed here involves a woman, trying to cash a check from her boss during the COVID-19 pandemic, who was kicked out of the bank by an employee. She needed the money to buy her baby some formula, and in an act that suggests the work of Crump and others might be having some effect, it's some police officers, clearly aware of and sympathetic toward what this woman is going through, who give her some cash to buy the formula.

All of these cases and anecdotes—save for the case of the murder of George Floyd, whose family Crump represented in the civil case against the city of Minneapolis—are only briefly presented here, and that's both a sad commentary on the state of racial equality in this country, because there are too many for Hallgren to fully detail within the case of a single year, and the major downfall of this documentary from a narrative perspective. The former reality doesn't need to re-asserted in this documentary, but because that seems to be the filmmaker's guiding principle, Crump's actual work, his legal philosophy, and, most importantly, the broader technique and specific strategies he uses to enact that philosophy ultimately feel secondary to this movie.

Crump is always present, of course, but Hallgren's documentary, which follows the attorney over a period of time between 2020 and 2021, mostly seems concerned with the personal side of the lawyer's life. A couple sections detail his biography (offering a single story of his childhood, before jumping ahead to the influence of a college fraternity and his wedding to the woman who's still his wife), while others see him in various hotel rooms and on video calls with his wife and daughter. The most important scenes here show Crump discussing the lives and deaths of victims of police brutality with their families, as the lawyer points out that the court of public opinion might be the only one where the case is held. Floyd's murder trial was historic for a reason, after all.

The documentary breezes through all of this, though, and we're left wanting more about any of these cases or, since it does cover so many of them, some kind of specificity in regards to Crump's legal methods. Instead, Civil quickly recounts the attorney's personal history, before putting him on the sidelines of history-in-the-making (The climax has him watching two separate legal decisions on a monitor). Crump himself might contend that he doesn't deserve more attention than this, but the work he's doing definitely does.

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