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ERIN BROCKOVICH
Pop culture gets slammed often enough by moralists, so it’s only fair to note those times when all the commercial ingredients come together and benefit social justice. A few million more will see this film and be moved by the environmental struggle against corporate greed simply because it’s also an entertaining Hollywood story.
Not only is the heroine a good woman, a caring single mom, an underdog, a battler who triumphs against evil and impossible odds. But she’s also pinup-girl sexy (played with gusto by Julia Roberts). This is a smart, sassy woman who stands up for the mistreated and abused common folks. She kicks the tar out of the country’s most despised contemporary villains: fat-cat polluters and stuffy, overpaid, overeducated lawyers.
That it’s all based on fact doesn’t hurt. By now Brockovich, the dedicated single mom with a penchant for provocative clothing and brash nonstop conversation, has become TV famous. Her achievement was ultra serious. She did the hard investigative work that allowed a small Los Angeles law firm to win a multimillion dollar suit against a rich corporation. Her clients were more than 400 people in a California desert town stricken by misery and disease caused by an out of control industrial chemical.
But it’s even better than that, since Erin starts from ground zero, unemployed and feeling unemployable. She’s not so unusual a woman in contemporary America a divorced mom with kids to raise and no special job skills. After worse luck (losing a traffic-accident suit), she charms a marginal job as a researcher out of her unhappy attorney (delightfully befuddled Albert Finney).
Digging into an apparently minor case, Erin works hard, follows her instincts and discovers serious duplicity in which the victims don’t really understand what has hit them. She has drive but, above all, compassion enough to give the movie substance.
Brockovich is in the tradition of flicks about idealistic blue collar women battling well-heeled capitalists (Norma Rae, Silkwood, Country). Erin’s character gives it a bit more spice and pop charisma: more David vs. Goliath, justice vs. arrogance, working class vs. privileged class, underrated girl vs. overrated boys.
She’s not the ideal hero, but her faults, compared to her virtues, are minor. Director Steve Soderbergh makes his third strong film in a row (Out of Sight, The Limey), with a Capra esque view of people as courageous, decent and worth caring about.
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