 |
ERIN BROCKOVICH |
|
Julia Roberts, Albert Finney
|
|
| Erin
Brockovich is one of those lone-justice crowd-pleasers, like ''Norma Rae''
or ''Silkwood,'' in which a workaday woman dares to fight the system because
she's too stubborn, or foolhardy, to know that she's not supposed to. Julia
Roberts' feisty, take-no-prisoners Erin coerces her way into an entry-level
job at a scruffy Los Angeles law office, the sort of place in which the
wood paneling looks like it hasn't been changed since the early '70s and
where the attorney in charge is a middle-aged ulcer candidate named Ed Masry
(Albert Finney). |
| |
|
Assigned to do some paperwork on what looks like a trivial pro bono case,
Erin stumbles upon a hidden epidemic. Dozens of residents in nearby Hinkley
have fallen victim to multiple tumors, degenerative organs, and other freak
afflictions, yet no one has surmised that the wave of catastrophic illness
might have something to do with Pacific Gas & Electric, the industrial plant
on the edge of town. With little to go on but her gut, Erin learns that
PG&E has employed a deadly form of chromium as an anti-rust agent, thereby
contaminating the local water supply. |
| |
|
Why does Erin alone see through the company's lies? Mostly because of how
torn up she is over the victims. She's wounded by their plight, especially
that of the tremulous, naive Mrs. Jensen (played with touching vulnerability
by Marg Helgenberger). The result is that her investigation never feels
overtly noble or righteous; it's a matter of sheer empathetic will. |
| |
|
''Erin Brockovich'' is based on a true story, but almost everything in it
feels familiar from previous corporate-malfeasance thrillers like ''A Civil
Action.'' The movie is consistently engrossing, never quite exciting. Its
surprise -- and its pleasure -- is the plainspoken humanity of its outrage,
its utter absence of demagoguery and hype. The arc of the tale may be conventional,
but Roberts, in her most forceful dramatic performance, allows us to take
in every moment through fresh, impassioned eyes. |
| |
|
Erin and Ed become tag-team detective partners, and it's a delight to watch
Roberts, with her flirtatious sparkle and undertow of melancholy, ricochet
off Finney's wonderfully jaded, dry-as-beef-jerky performance as the beleaguered
career attorney who knows too much about the loopholes of his profession
to have much faith left in it. As George, the biker next door who becomes
Erin's lover after he begins to look after her kids, Aaron Eckhart, swathed
in tattoos and an overgrown foliage of goatee and sideburns, may be playing
a bit of an ideal -- a rebel/hunk/househusband -- but he makes goodness
as palpable as he did yuppie evil in ''In the Company of Men.'' |
| |
|
In a sense, the film's ultimate villain is the bureaucratic impersonality
of the legal system. Ed doesn't think that his firm has the financial resources
to win the case, and so he brings in a couple of expensive, big-shot lawyers
(Peter Coyote and a rather too caricatured Veanne Cox) to help shoulder
the burden. The ultimate weapon, of course, is Erin herself; she's the only
one who cares enough to bother winning the trust of the plaintiffs. ''Brockovich''
can be as foursquare inspirational as a Capra film (the smoking gun that
finally indicts PG&E practically drops out of the sky), but director Steven
Soderbergh has made it with the sort of gentle, unfussy confidence that
allows him to throw away the movie's culminating moment on a quiet front
porch. This is a muckraker that hums with decency. |
| |
|
Grade: B+ |
| |
| --
Owen Gleiberman |
| |
| from:
Entertainment Weekly Online |
|
|
|
© 2000
IHTML & Maria Jose All Rights Reserved.
|
