Julia Roberts may never find another part as perfect for her as the title role in “Erin Brockovich,” and it’s also possible she’ll never star in a better movie. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, this captivating picture is based on the real-life case of a Los Angeles working mother and law office file clerk who becomes a key investigator in a huge lawsuit filed against a powerful utility accused of widescale pollution of a community’s water supply. It’s one of the gutsiest, most exciting, and most satisfying courtroom docudramas ever, one that genuinely lifts the spirits as you watch it.
As Brockovich, Roberts simply sets the screen on fire. She’s playing a character who honestly qualifies for that over-used movie-review feminine adjective “feisty”: a dead-broke, drop-dead gorgeous mother of three who parleys a job as file clerk in a seedy little law office into a self-created position as head investigator in the lawsuit, which is waged against the California utility giant, Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
As in “Notting Hill” or “Runaway Bride” — two runaway Julia Roberts hits I didn’t much like — we know we’re watching the actress in a signature role here, doing what she does best: flashing sass, strutting her stuff and training those great liquid eyes on us. But in “Brockovich,” Roberts subsumes all those qualities believably into the character. It’s an ideal mix for her. She gets to play a convincingly smart, brave, funny and idealistic heroine. And she also gets to be “Julia Roberts” star icon, overpowering the screen with that high-voltage smile and wearing the sort of deliciously tacky, eye-catching, figure-hugging outfits that made her a star in “Pretty Woman.”
That film was a Cinderella story, and in a way so is “Brockovich,” scripted by Susannah Grant (“Ever After”) — even if here, Roberts plays her own fairy godmother. She begins the movie in high spirits but dire straits. She is a woman alone trying to provide for her kids, applying for jobs from insulting interviewers, getting her car smashed by a careless — but rich — doctor and then getting torpedoed by that same reckless medico’s smug lawyer in court.
Jobless, fundless, still sporting a neck-brace from the car crash (an accessory that clashes only mildly with her gaudy tube tops and mini-skirts), Brockovich then bullies her way into a file clerk job with her own unsuccessful lawyer, a somewhat sloppy but compassionate old legal beagle named Ed Masry (another real-life character played with relish by Albert Finney). And while alienating her more staid co-workers with her trashy-sexy outfits, Brockovich soon uncovers some oddities: medical reports that have been strangely inserted into real estate files and a large number of land buys in Hinkley, Calif., by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
Is something rotten in the town of Hinkley? Snooping further, Brockovich discovers that many of its residents have been devastated by a succession of diseases up to and including cancer, and that the cause of all this may be the local water supplies, fouled by PG&E dumping of a dangerous toxin. Even worse, PG&E has deliberately deceived the residents about the intensity of this pollution.
Incensed — and smelling money (and perhaps vindication for the lawsuit she lost) — Brockovich pores through files, bewitching a local clerk to gain access. Soon she has talked Masry into putting together a case. And she then begins cajoling most of the residents of Hinkley into signing on as plaintiffs. Putting aside her home life — including her romance with a next-door neighbor, a sweet-tempered biker named George (Aaron Eckhart) — she keeps plowing ahead. The rest of the movie, based closely on the facts, anatomizes that lawsuit and Erin’s private life with rich detail, empathy and the visual verve and energy of a good cinma vrit documentary.
Soderbergh and his writers convincingly show how Brockovich’s life suffered as she pursued the case. And they show how Masry’s law firm ultimately has to compromise with the legal establishment, bringing in another high-powered law firm (two, in real life, to avoid going bankrupt). By the end of the film, we see both sides of the story, the public and personal. And it makes us appreciate Roberts’ protagonist all the more. (The real Erin Brockovich pops up in the movie, as a waitress with a nametag reading “Julia,” who waits on the movie’s “Erin” and her kids — while the real Ed Masry sits at a nearby counter.)
Above all, “Erin Brockovich” is a movie where everything — legal jargon as well as everyday tiffs — is laid out with shining lucidity. Soderbergh, who began as a specialist in cinematic voyeurism and alienation (“sex, lies and videotape”) but more recently has proven himself as a master of modern film noir (“Out of Sight,” “The Limey”), here takes the noir style further, into his own version of those classic ’40s true-life Henry Hathaway crime thrillers.
Befitting the California origins of this tale, he keeps everything in bright, splashy sunlight and packed with colorful characters: long-suffering Hinkley victim Donna Jensen (Marg Helgenberger); Cherry Jones as town gadfly Pamela Duncan; Tracey Walter as a mysterious little man haunting Erin; and Peter Coyote as the snobbish big-time lawyer who joins the case. The movie’s mood is entirely different from the sinister or portentously ominous feel directors often try to give stories like this, as in “The Insider.” It’s light, buoyant, as effervescent and sexy as the heroine herself. Many of the performances — especially Finney’s, Eckhart’s, Walter’s and Roberts’ — are triumphs of that lighter key, and no less affecting because they’re done with such zest. “Erin Brockovich” is sunlit noir.
In some ways, there are few cinematic sights more satisfying than seeing the bastions of the well-fixed and complacently destructive stormed by a “little guy” with chutzpah. Like “Roger and Me,” “The Rainmaker” or “Norma Rae” (or even Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”), “Erin Brockovich” lets us exult in the spectacle of an assault by “regular guys and gals” on arrogance and wealth (all the more satisfying because it’s based on a true story, one in which right really did triumph over might). The movie is near-perfect entertainment: instructive but not laborious, exciting but not mindless, funny but not foolish, romantic but not sappy. I loved it. And, at least this time, I loved Julia Roberts, too — who can thank her stars for being given the kind of showcase most actors only dream about.
“ERIN BROCKOVICH”
(star) (star) (star) (star)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Susannah Grant; photographed by Ed Lachman; production designed by Phil Messina; edited by Anne V. Coates; music by Thomas Newman; produced by Danny DeVito. A Universal Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:11. MPAA rating: R (language).
THE CAST
Erin Brockovich ………. Julia Roberts
Ed Masry …………….. Albert Finney
George ………………. Aaron Eckhart
Donna Jensen …………. Marg Helgenberger
Pamela Duncan ………… Cherry Jones
Kurt Potter ………….. Peter Coyote
