The title of the movie alone is enough to turn you off of Erin Brockovich from the very start. It sounds more like a Russian novel than what it really is: a charming tale about one woman's quest to make a big corporation pay for the pain it has caused amongst a small town's population.
The appeal of the film is a little late in coming, however, and the movie is almost laid to rest prematurely purely due to the lead character's attitude. If you can get past the clunky title, you will find Julia Roberts displaying, in the first half an hour of the film, a decided lack of the charisma that has made her a star. In the eponymous lead role, she is brash and rude, shouting obscenities at all who cross her path and failing again and again to put herself in the good graces of any of the potential employers she meets, or of us in the audience.
In the beginning of the film Julia plays Erin as almost totally unpleasant, with very few positive qualities that we in the audience could identify with. Since it is hard for us not to dislike Erin as a person, it becomes difficult for us to care what is happening to her, and eventually the film is on the verge of completely losing our interest.
But Erin Brockovich (both the film and the main character) is saved by a sheer miracle. Erin manages to magically land a job at a small law firm, despite her total lack of skills and abrasive demeanor. When a file about a real estate dispute ends up on her desk, she decides, I suppose out of pure boredom, to investigate the case herself.
It would seem to be sheer Hollywood plot contrivance that allows her to get the job and begin researching this case if we had not been warned in the beginning that this film is based on a true story. But despite that it might seem fabricated in the beginning, once Erin starts working on the case, we forget about that and the movie is saved.
Erin's harsh temperament helps her win the trust of the lower and middle class families that eventually become involved in the case. When Erin discovers that these people were poisoned by a chemical factory near their homes, her heart goes out to them, and we begin to see the soul behind the tough exterior she puts forth. In gaining the respect of these people while fighting for them in the face of the corporate giants, Erin redeems herself, showing a caring aspect of her humanity that we had not seen before. She may be rough around the edges, but she is battling for what she believes in, and that we as an audience can admire.
Julia Roberts' portrayal of Erin as a compassionate but rugged single mother goes a long way towards delivering this film back into the audience's good graces, but without her supporting cast she certainly would not have succeeded. Albert Finney plays the lawyer Erin ropes into taking the case on, and Aaron Eckhart portrays a father figure to Erin's children and a love interest to Erin herself. Both of these actors are able to provide Julia Roberts with strong characters who can serve as Erin's emotional reinforcement, people she can lean on in times of stress. Eckhart especially here displays an enormous talent in his ability to play the sensitive biker boyfriend, a 180-degree turn from his most famous role to date, the woman-hating main character in the indie film In The Company of Men.
A minor flaw in the film lies in its total lack of visual direction. Steven Soderbergh, the director of this film, has in the past given us excellent movies such as sex, lies and videotape and Out of Sight. But here he seems to be on auto-pilot, totally willing to let the film's story speak for itself and ignoring anything but a straightforward approach to the making of the film. The direction truly seemed like it was only trying to be average, when so much more could have been done with the storytelling using the visual medium.
But by the end the story has become engaging that nothing else matters. Erin's character softens considerably when she comes into contact with the victims, and the story uses her low-class status well to make us truly care about the normal people who were wronged by this corporation. Although we may see the plaintiffs in the case in no more than a few scenes, their presence is always felt. Erin Brockovich is a very human, heartwarming story that, despite some bumpy spots at the start, audiences will definitely find engaging.
