Erin Brockovich (2000) Review

A woman with three children, no qualifications and no money loses a personal injury case she brought herself, talks her way into a job at her own lawyer’s firm, and finds medical records in a real estate file that should not be there.

The job interview is not a scene, which is the film’s first good decision. She appears at a desk the following week having arranged it offscreen, and the picture treats her getting in as a fact and not as a triumph.

The 7 is for a film that does the procedural work properly. The case is assembled on screen, the legal problem is specific, and the film understands that a class action is a logistics exercise conducted by somebody knocking on doors.

It is also a star vehicle in the most literal sense, and the performance is charismatic, well judged and considerably easier than the one it beat.

The film also took around two hundred and fifty-six million dollars worldwide on a budget near fifty-two, which is the commercial context for everything that followed in the awards season .

The Case Is Real Work

The film’s strongest material is the process, and Soderbergh gives it more time than a star vehicle normally would.

The specifics are correct. Hexavalent chromium in groundwater, a utility company that knew, a settlement structure that requires individual plaintiffs instead of a class, and a problem about whether the parent corporation can be reached.

The film also explains the difference between the two forms of chromium, briefly and correctly, which is the kind of thing most pictures would skip and is exactly why the case feels real when it arrives in court.

That last point is the film’s actual plot and it is a legal question. The subsidiary has limited assets, the parent has money, and the case only works if somebody can prove the parent knew, which is what the documents in the water board office are for.

The water board scenes are also the film’s quietest and best-observed. A public records office, a clerk who is helpful because nobody has ever asked, and documents sitting in a drawer that anybody could have requested for twenty years.

Aaron Eckhart is the third performance and is doing something small and useful. George looks after her children, is treated by the film as entirely competent at it, and is eventually left because the case takes everything she has.

The door-knocking is where the film earns itself. Erin sits in kitchens, writes down symptoms, records names, and the six hundred plaintiffs are assembled one household at a time across a sequence that runs longer than a film like this usually permits.

The real Erin Brockovich also appears briefly as a waitress, which is the kind of cameo that means nothing and is worth knowing about. She served as a consultant and the film reproduces her manner closely by all accounts.

Roberts

The performance is very good at what it is doing and the rating reflects that instead of dismissing it.

What she brings is a specific quality of refusal. Erin does not modify her clothes, her language or her manner for any room she enters, and Roberts plays the refusal as a decision and not as ignorance.

The film also gives her a genuinely difficult first day. Nobody speaks to her, the other staff have decided about her before she sits down, and the hostility is played as ordinary office behavior and not as villainy.

The best scene is a deposition where she is condescended to about the water and answers with the figures. She knows the numbers, has learned them, and the film lets her be competent instead of intuitive, which the genre usually does not.

The limitation is that the part is written to be liked. Erin is right about everything, her instincts are always correct, and the film gives her no error to recover from, which is what separates a good star performance from a great one.

The wardrobe is also doing more work than it is credited with. Erin dresses in a way every professional she meets reads as a signal, the film never has anybody explain it, and the costume is carrying an entire class argument.

Albert Finney

Ed Masry is the film’s second subject and Finney is doing something more difficult than the lead.

The character is a competent small-firm lawyer who did not want this case, cannot afford it, is continuously frightened by the exposure, and stays in anyway for reasons he never articulates.

The relationship works because neither of them likes the other much. They argue about expenses, about her manner, about hours, and the film never converts it into a friendship or a father-daughter arrangement.

Their argument about her expenses is the best of those scenes. She has billed for things he thinks are unreasonable, she explains why each one was necessary, and neither of them concedes anything by the end of it.

His best scene is about money. He explains that the firm has borrowed against everything, that a loss ends him, and that he is going to continue, and Finney plays it as a man who has done arithmetic he does not want to have done.

Finney was nominated for Supporting Actor and lost to Benicio del Toro for Traffic, which means Soderbergh’s two films competed against each other in that category as well, and the Traffic performance won there too.

Soderbergh in 2000

He had two films nominated for Best Picture that year, this and Traffic, and won Best Director for the other one.

The one visible technique here is the water. Sprinklers, taps, a swimming pool, a reservoir, and the film keeps putting water in frame without drawing attention to it, which is the only place Soderbergh is arguing anything visually.

The contrast between them is instructive about range. Traffic is three strands, three color schemes, hand-held and formally aggressive, and this is a conventional star vehicle shot cleanly with almost no visible technique.

That restraint is a decision and it is the right one. A film carried by a performance does not need a director asserting himself, and the photography here is unobtrusive in a way Traffic is deliberately not.

What both films share is the procedural interest. Soderbergh is the same director in both, spending time on how a thing really works, and the difference is entirely in what the material required.

He also shot both films himself under the Peter Andrews pseudonym, which makes the contrast a single person’s two decisions instead of two cinematographers’ preferences.

Ellen Burstyn

Best Actress went to Roberts. Burstyn was nominated for Requiem for a Dream and this page argues she should have won.

The comparison is not close on difficulty. Sara Goldfarb is a widow whose amphetamine dependency and television obsession produce a total psychological collapse across two hours, ending in a state the film depicts without any mitigation.

Burstyn has said she found it the hardest work of her career and the performance shows why. The physical decline, the accelerating speech, the delusional sequences and the final institutional scenes are each a different technical problem.

Roberts also arrived with a twenty-million-dollar fee, the first for an actress, and the narrative of that milestone was part of the season. A performance attached to an industry story is competing on more than itself, which is the recurring observation on this page.

Should you watch Erin Brockovich?

Yes, and it is better than its reputation as an Oscar complaint. Six hundred plaintiffs assembled one kitchen at a time, a legal problem about reaching a parent company through a subsidiary, two people who do not much like each other working a case, and a charismatic performance in a part written to be liked.

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