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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In this sexy, exciting legal drama, Steven Soderbergh delivers his most straightforward movie -- and Julia Roberts her best performance.
Mar 17, 2000 | There has long been a flinty side to Julia Roberts, an edge of impatient, cutting intelligence that the crowd-pleasing movies she has often chosen to make haven't been able to contain or smooth over. In last year's "Runaway Bride" it was easy enough to believe that someone of Roberts' independent disposition would balk at the prospect of marriage. But when the movie shifted into the damnable therapeutic mode that has taken over romantic comedy, the picture fell apart. You couldn't believe for an instant that Roberts suffered from low self-esteem, that she would ever say or do less than exactly what she meant. The slight awkwardness that made Roberts' coltish beauty touching in her early films was long ago replaced by a self-aware confidence that is inimical to an era when most big roles for women play on magazine-article notions of women's insecurities rather than their capabilities. Sometimes, watching Roberts try to shoehorn herself into contemporary soft-as-slippers entertainment, I've thought it a pity she wasn't a star in the '30s, a tougher-minded time that would have known exactly what to do with her.
So it's no wonder that in the title role of "Erin Brockovich," the best she's ever had, Roberts is in a direct line of descent from the feisty, smart -- and smart-talking -- roles once epitomized by Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck was the most quintessentially American actress because she was the most direct. Incapable of coyness (except as a ruse) or of hiding her brains or self-assurance, Stanwyck cut through all the crap that stood in her way. She got you immediately on her side.
From the opening to the perfect final shot, Roberts is in nearly every scene of "Erin Brockovich," and there isn't a second when we're not on her side. This enormously satisfying picture, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Susannah Grant's terrific script, is the true story of a single mother who uncovered evidence that resulted in Pacific Gas and Electric, the huge utility company, being ordered to pay the largest damages in any direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history.
The first time we see Erin she's applying for a job in a doctor's office, putting on a show of being cheerful and eager to learn, hoping it can make up for her lack of experience. Beneath that fagade Roberts conveys Erin's resentment at having to play nice and beg for what amounts to the chance to sit and answer phones all day. And the moment it becomes clear she won't get the job, the pretense crumbles, and her resentment comes to the surface. Up against it as Erin is, with three kids to feed, no job and a two-digit bank account, Roberts constantly eschews weariness for impatience. Erin isn't stupid and she's willing to work, but nobody will give her a chance.
When Erin gets screwed in a lawsuit she brought against a doctor who ran a red light and injured her, she marches right into the office of Ed Masry (Albert Finney), the attorney who'd told her everything would be all right, and demands a job. Her boldness pays off, and she's hired as a file clerk. While doing this job, which is little more than Ed's way of getting rid of her, Erin finds a discrepancy that arouses her curiosity and sets in motion a staggering discovery. At its station in the desert town of Hinkley, Calif., PG&E has poisoned the groundwater by dumping lethal doses of hexavalent chromium. As a result, residents of the town are riddled with cancer, and as Erin gets to know them through her own footwork, she pushes Ed to bring a lawsuit on their behalf that, if it doesn't succeed, could ruin his small firm.
Neither Roberts nor the filmmakers sentimentalize Erin's sense of feeling valued, of being thought of as smart for the first time in her life. For her, it's simply a matter of finally being accorded the respect she has always been denied and knows she deserves. Roberts plays Erin's acceptance of that newfound respect without a trace of narcissism or false heroism. And that's why she's a true hero. "Erin Brockovich" isn't (thank God) a redemption movie for the simple reason that Erin doesn't need redemption. What happens to her is that all of her instincts and experience finally count for something. But she has lived a life far too full of bad breaks to ever see the people in Hinkley as merely a means to an end. Unlike her co-workers in the law office, the folks she encounters in the desert town don't look at her and see a bimbo wearing high heels and push-up bras that peek out of her skimpy tops. To the movie's credit Erin doesn't spruce up and stop wearing the cheap flashy clothes she knows she looks sexy in. It's as if Soderbergh is inviting us to make the same mistake everyone else does and underestimate Erin because of the way she looks.
