Erin Brockovich (2000) Review
7/10
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 shouldn’t be there. The job interview isn’t a scene. That’s 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.
I like this film a lot more than I like its Oscar. Roberts is terrific company, Finney is better, and the case work is as satisfying as legal procedure gets on screen. My complaint is about the part itself. Erin is right about everything from start to finish, and a character who never gets anything wrong is fun to watch and hard to remember.
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’s 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. That’s 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.
It also explains the difference between the two forms of chromium, briefly and correctly. That’s 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’s a legal question. The subsidiary has limited assets, the parent has money, and the case only works if somebody can prove the parent knew. That’s 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’s 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, the film treats him as entirely competent at it, and she eventually leaves him 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 door-knocking is my favorite stretch of the film. Soderbergh lets it run long, and I’d have let it run longer. Kitchen after kitchen, names in a notebook, and by the end the six hundred plaintiffs feel like people instead of a number on a settlement.
The real Erin Brockovich also appears briefly as a waitress. That’s 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.
Give a legal or institutional problem a specific technical shape. Reaching a parent company through a subsidiary is a real question with a real answer, and it’s a better plot than a villain. Vague corporate wrongdoing generates no scenes. A document that proves knowledge generates all of them. Spend time on the accumulation. Six hundred plaintiffs assembled one kitchen at a time is the film’s most affecting sequence because the number is built instead of stated.
Research shows as specificity and specificity reads as truth. Hexavalent chromium is a better detail than chemicals. The real settlement was three hundred and thirty-three million dollars in 1996, the largest of its kind in American history at the time, and the film states the figure and lets it sit.
Roberts
The performance is very good at what it’s doing and the rating reflects that instead of dismissing it. What she brings is a quality of refusal. Erin doesn’t 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.
Her first day is also a difficult one. 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’s 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. The genre usually doesn’t.
The part is written to be liked, and that costs the film a couple of points with me. Erin is right about everything, her instincts never fail, and the script never gives her an error to recover from. That’s what separates a good star performance from a great one for me, and I’d have traded one of her victory laps for a single bad call she had to own.
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 didn’t want this case, can’t 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’s 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’s going to continue, and Finney plays it as a man who has done arithmetic he doesn’t want to have done.
Finney is my favorite thing in the film. He plays a man who’s scared of going broke and stays anyway, and I believe every second of that fear. Roberts got the trophy, but Finney does the harder work, and I’d watch the two of them argue about expenses for another hour.
Finney was nominated for Supporting Actor and lost to Benicio del Toro for Traffic. That means Soderbergh’s two films competed against each other in that category as well, and the Traffic performance won there too.
Two people who don’t much like each other and continue working together is more durable than a friendship. Every scene has friction available and none of it requires a plot. The failure mode is converting it into affection in the third act. This film mostly resists.
Give the reluctant party a financial reason to be frightened. A man who has borrowed against his house is in the story, and one who’s merely cautious is commentary.
Aaron Eckhart is the third performance and is doing something small and useful. George is a biker who looks after her children, the film treats him as entirely competent at it, and she eventually leaves him because the case takes everything.
Let somebody stay for reasons they can’t state. Masry never explains and the film never asks him to.
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’s the water. Sprinklers, taps, a swimming pool, a reservoir, and the film keeps putting water in frame without drawing attention to it. That’s 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’s the right one. A film carried by a performance doesn’t need a director asserting himself, and the photography here’s 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. That 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 isn’t 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.
I think the Academy got this one badly wrong.
Burstyn comes apart on screen in ways that are hard to watch and harder to do, and Roberts, as good as she is here, plays a woman who’s charming in every scene. Voters rewarded the performance they enjoyed more. I understand why, and I still think they picked the lesser one.
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. That’s the recurring observation on this page.
A likeable character who’s right about everything is easier to play well than one who disintegrates. Both can be good and only one is difficult. The assessable achievement is the visible one, and charm is more visible than collapse is legible.
Give your protagonist one significant error. Erin has none. That caps the performance regardless of how well it’s executed. An industry narrative around a performer will attach to the performance. Nothing about that is in the performer’s control and it affects the record permanently. Roberts has since said very little about the comparison. That’s the right response. A performer competes against the field they’re given and doesn’t choose it.
The twenty-million fee is also worth stating accurately. It was the first for an actress, it was a milestone, and it’s the kind of fact that generates coverage in a season regardless of what anybody involved wanted.
Should you watch Erin Brockovich?
Yes, watch it. My 7 is for a legal drama that does the legwork on screen, a Finney performance I’d put above the lead, and Roberts at her most magnetic. It stops at 7 because the script protects Erin from ever being wrong, and that keeps the film pleasant when it could have been great. It’s still far better than its reputation as the movie that beat Ellen Burstyn.
