|
Steven
Soderbergh directs Julia Roberts in a mature, powerful, deeply moving
performance of Erin Brockovich, a woman who has traded on her sex appeal
and stubbornness to disastrous effect until she finds her perfection as
a legal assistant championing the cause of a small community ravaged by
a polluting industrial titan. We all boo and hiss when corporate
corruption, cover-up, and greed knowingly hurt people. The courage of
movie heroes and heroines to dig up the truth and stand against the
malevolent goliaths tickles our spirits as we glean the awesome power of
truth and goodness. Erin Brockovich is a magnificently adapted
true story of one woman’s crusade against a corporate behemoth, but
that is not what makes this movie the second gem of the year for both of
us.
Erin Brokovich offers a powerful vision for how a woman can
achieve personal and professional victory by overcoming the external and
internal constraints that keep her from integrating the full power of
her sexuality, her mouth, her almost obsessive doggedness, her untapped
intelligence, and her relationship charisma to cut through to the truth.
As the movie opens, Erin begs for work for which she has no training.
The highlight of her personal background has been a stint as Miss
Wichita. Like many young women who are blinded by the easy triumphs
their beauty procures, Erin has invested life’s resources poorly. She
has been married and divorced twice and is struggling to raise three
kids. Without a man or a job, her prospects seem dim, even to her. She
teeters on the brink of disaster.
Erin finds some hope in the form of a wealthy doctor who runs a red
light and slams into her car. Erin believes she’s hit a litigation
jackpot. Her lawyer, Ed Masry (Albert Finney) tries to tame her mouthy
bitchiness in court, but she blows it on the stand and ends up with
nothing. She then plays on her lawyer’s guilt about losing the case to
leverage a job as a gofer in his office. In
many ways, Erin is the white trash employee from hell. She wears garish
outfits. She badgers the other employees and Ed with ripping insults.
There may be truth in her jibes, but they are so hostile that she
becomes more a liability than an asset.
The real opportunity presents itself when Erin is given a routine,
pro-bono (meaning the law firm gets no money) real estate purchase case
in which a huge utility company (PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric)
is buying out the property of a family living next to one of its desert
plants. Erin smells a rat and begins to investigate what turns into a
major scandal. PG&E has knowingly dumped toxic levels of a deadly
form of Chromium into the town’s water. Horrific diseases afflict most
families living around the plant, but the people don’t realize
PG&E has been the culprit.
The dramatic tension that drives this movie so deeply into the heart
is the transformation in Erin. She has always had a tremendous
underutilized talent for gaining empathy, especially from the genuinely
downtrodden. She also has a superb memory for detail and a powerful
instinct for visceral confrontation with the flunkies and fops in the
legal profession who try to bury her and the case in paper and bull.
Finding a way to nail PG&E gives Erin the perfect opportunity to
express her many gifts and benefit herself and others, but to succeed,
she must make major changes and sacrifices.
Some of the story elements of Erin’s success seem like a Hollywood
fairy tale. Her next-door neighbor is a motorcycle riding construction
worker between jobs with the time and the heart to tend her kids while
she focuses on her job. Too good to be true perhaps, but then, all
stories that have motivated us to broaden our consciousness, to accept
more freedom and to achieve greater things than our station, our race,
or gender would have allowed, have fairy tale elements. What is so
important and moving about the stories like Erin Brockovich is
their magical ability to provide an image of how we might overcome the
external, and more importantly the internal, shackles that bind us.
The power of the Prince (even in the form of a good looking
construction worker) in this movie is not that he brings the magical
answer to Erin, but that he tempts her to fall into the role of a kept
Princess. At one point he demands more attention and makes the ever so
enticing demand that Erin leave the rat race of her legal career behind
to be with him and the kids. He calls on the deep longing in a feminine
soul to fall back on the intimacy of a man rescuing her, taking care of
her and her chicks, soothing her hurt and loneliness, salving her
desperation. With great pain, Erin declares her will and pulls back from
him to claim her own destiny.
Erin has to make hard choices not just about her romance. As a
struggling, single, working woman, she must find a way to be true to the
demands of her kids. Even with the convenient Prince as part of the
answer, Erin must find the place to love them and still achieve her
glory. In a scene of
immense pathos, this in many ways irresolvable dilemma finds a
resolution. Erin’s son, who has become more and more resentful of his
mom’s absence, finds a statement about a badly afflicted child his
age. We won’t spoil the details, but what a magnificent way to show a
boy suddenly mature with understanding and acceptance of his mother’s
hard work.
Erin’s other source of power comes from her ability to adapt her
Aphroditic allure, which previously led to her failed dependence on men,
into a weapon to cajole and seduce to get information. Her boobs, often
consciously flaunted by buttoning down her tops to show a lot of
cleavage and tan line, lead the way to important concessions and
revelations.
A lot of the emotional grip of Erin Brockovich comes from the
clever dialog and intriguing story line. The interweaving of the words,
the actions, the legal story, and the personal transformation journey
are done with exceptional quality by one of our new favorite
screenwriters, Susannah Grant. She wrote Ever After, Pocahontas,
and the soon to be released 28 Days. Ms. Grant always puts women
in roles where their character development is crucial to resolving all
of the dramatic dilemmas. Even if her heroines get the man, it is not at
the cost of personal integrity. We look forward to many more scripts
with this powerful vision for how women can be as much as they are
gifted to be, with all their flaws and blessings included.
However, the greatest delight of Erin Brockovich is Julia
Roberts. She stunned us with her acumen, maturity, and beauty. We are
accustomed to seeing her portray women emerging from confusion or
weakness, but never have her tears, her expressions, her sauciness, her
body, her face, even her huge smile been more glowing. We are beginning
to see the deeper beauty in her performances that comes with maturity.
When the history of the cinema of this era is told, we believe that
Julia will be a lasting tribute to stories that showed how sexual power
can be integrated with personal power to achieve glory for and by women.
We also acknowledge Albert Finney in a fine portrayal of a bemused
lawyer who struggles to keep his balance with Erin and the huge case
that threatens to bankrupt him when he is almost ready to retire. There
is powerful chemistry between Ed and Erin, though it is not overtly
sexual. They do not have to do "it" to have significant impact
on each other. These two feral scrappers live best by their wits and
their clashing. Often in ways neither seems to expect, they draw out the
best in each other.
And so, Erin ultimately hits her jackpot when she does the work she
is best suited to do with gusto, determination, and sacrifice. What a
magnificent cinematic metaphor to give us the vision to be more than we
seem, to be all that we can be.
E-mail
us!
BACK TO
TOP |
|
DIRECTED
BY:
Steven Soderbergh
WRITTEN BY:
Susannah Grant
CAST:
Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich
Albert Finney as Ed Masry
Aaron Eckhart as George
Marg Helgenberger as Donna Jensen
Cherry Jones as Pamela Duncan
Peter Coyote as Kurt Potter
Scotty Leavenworth as Matthew
Gemmenne De La Peña
MPAA RATING:
R for language
LINKS:
Now Available:
|
