Courage and Cleavage
FILM: Erin Brockovich
DIRECTOR: Steven Soderbergh
STARRING: Julia Roberts, Albert Finney
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AS ERIN BROCKOVICH, JULIA ROBERTS TRIES TO HELP THE CITIZENS OF A SMALL TOWN BATTLE A TOXIC-WASTE-DUMPING CORPORATION.
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In Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich, the title character is having a very bad day in the midst of a pretty bad life. A one-time beauty queen who
married in her teens and immediately had children, Erin (Julia Roberts at her
most luminously appealing) is pushing 30 with two deadbeat ex-husbands, two
kids in need of day care, and a baby in her arms. As we meet her, she's trying
to get a job, but she has no prior experience, no connections and no education.
She doesn't know bookkeeping, and she hasn't worked on a computer. While one
unimpressed potential employer turns her down, she gets a parking ticket that
she can't possibly pay. Then she gets in a car wreck. The movie doesn't tell us
how she survives the next little while, but her dreams of landing a sizable
insurance settlement are scuttled when she blows up on the stand while being
cross-examined by a nasty defense lawyer. Then she goes home to learn that her
babysitter has quit. This young woman evidently doesn't have a chance. Only she
does, of course. She does because she's got something more important than
applicable training, contacts and definitive job skills. She's got native
intelligence, and she's got pluck.
Written by Susannah Grant and based on a true story, Erin
Brockovich follows its heroine as she brazenly demands a research
assistant's job from small-firm attorney Ed Masry (Albert Finney) and
accidentally trips over a multi-million dollar class-action suit that makes
Love Canal look like The Love Connection. Erin starts out working on
what she thinks is a small real-estate case. The Pacific Gas and Electric
Company (PG&E) is trying to buy residential property in the neighborhood of
one of its natural gas processing plants. But as Erin tries to determine how
much her clients should expect in payment for their home and lot, she learns of
their horrible recent health problems. Quickly thereafter, she discovers that
everybody in the neighborhood has been experiencing life-threatening illness.
In short, PG&E has been using a toxic compound in its gas processing, and
the chemical has seeped into the area's water supply. If Erin can prove the
utility had knowledge of its careless pollution, her clients, who eventually
total more than 600 souls in the region, stand to win millions of dollars in
damages.
On the surface, Erin Brockovich resembles such
pollution-centered legal thrillers as Mike Nichols' Silkwood and Steve
Zaillian's A Civil Action, but it's far less somber than either and
decidedly better than the latter. Industrial pollution is a sinister menace, of
course, and Erin Brockovich takes the suffering of PG&E's victims
entirely seriously. The picture does not take itself all that seriously,
however, and that turns out to be a happy strategy, indeed. The film is
centrally concerned not so much with the case itself but with Erin's handling
of the case. She is not an attorney, she works at a small firm where the other
members of the support staff don't like her salty mouth, and her relationship
with her boss is complicated, to say the least. Moreover, Erin is largely blind
to her faults and stubborn about her weaknesses. In a white-collar world, she's
working class and proud of it. She dresses like a vamp on the way out for an
evening of bar hopping, and if you don't like the prominence of her cleavage,
go look at something else.
The narrative in this flick isn't exactly believable in real-world
terms, but it isn't trying to be. The picture pushes off from a serious subject
but doesn't strive to instruct. It merely endeavors to entertain. And at that
goal, it does a boffo job. Narrative drive crackles from the get-go. Will Erin
find the documents she needs to prove the utility willfully negligent? Is
PG&E willing to hurt her to stop her? Will her new biker boyfriend (Aaron
Eckhart, that despicable, misogynistic businessman in In the Company of
Men, showing tremendous range) tolerate the long hours she has to
work? Will Ed give up on her, or worse, sell out? Can Erin and Ed keep their
clients unified, or will they turn on each other, cut and run, hire other legal
representation? Ed feels required to bring in a new partner, but is he on the
level, or is he a double agent?
But as the film navigates through its story's troubled waters, it
does so with an exceedingly light hand on the tiller. Grant's script delivers a
half-dozen pleasing moments. And if Grant gives 98 percent of the best lines to
Roberts (who hits paydirt with every one), Baton Rouge native Soderbergh is
savvy enough to keep his camera trained on Finney's marvelous reactions. The
old British lion of stage and screen, now reduced to supporting roles, is still
a treasure. His response elicits almost as many laughs as Roberts' tirades.
Together, they make Erin Brockovich a sure-fire hit.
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