Erin Brockovich 
Nominated
for: Best
Picture
Won:
Best
actress in a leading role
Overview:
Julia Roberts reaffirms her superstar status with Erin Brockovich, an inspirational drama that is based on a true story. Roberts plays Erin Brockovich, a twice-divorced mother of three who is struggling to remain afloat. After she is involved in a car accident, she loses what should have been a lucrative settlement. Jobless and pressured, Erin convinces the attorney from her case, Ed Masry (Albert Finney), to hire her as a lawyer’s assistant. She also befriends her neighbor George (Aaron Eckhart), a sexy biker whose dedication to her children appears too good to be true. As Erin settles into her job, she convinces Ed to let her pursue a case that involves the residents of a local community. Apparently, several of the townspeople have become sick with cancer and other diseases. The more that Erin investigates, the more convinced she becomes of the guilt of Pacific Gas & Electric Company, an incredibly powerful corporation. Steven Soderbergh shoots Brockovich with a flashy realism that allows Roberts to shine every second she appears onscreen.
Review from Washington Post:
Rating: /5
That's the big news in "Erin Brockovich," and that's the news that'll probably make the movie a hit: Roberts busting out all over in a variety of skimpy outfits that look enameled on, where they're not slashed down toward the waist or up toward the hip. The star agitates like Jell-O aboard a runaway StairMaster as she takes on a California utilities company while blowing out that million-kilowatt smile.
But that's not the best news. The best news is that "Erin Brockovich" is terrific populist entertainment of the old school. It is a rabble-rousing cheerfest, based on a true story, that proves movies don't have to blow things up or scare the moisture out of you to make a buck. In Heaven, Frank Capra is pleased. Sure, a little T&A helps, and Roberts obliges, but her frankness of body is a reflection of the character's frankness of spirit.
When we first meet her, poor Erin, a fallen former beauty queen, has too many kids three and not enough jobs zero. Her life, driven by a high school diploma and little else, has been heretofore wasted on dead-end men and dead-end jobs; now she is abandoned again, and it has disintegrated into the chaos of unpaid bills, unmade beds and unfulfilled promise.
One very bad day, she's broadsided in her breadbox of a car. The next thing you know, Erin has hired small-potatoes lawyer Ed Masry (Albert Finney) and is suing the guy who hit her. And the next thing after that, she's losing her case, primarily because she showed up at the trial dressed like someone hoping to get a screen test at Vivid Videos. And the next thing things happen fast in this movie she's throwing a major scene at Masry's office to get a low filing-clerk's job.
That's the start, and Roberts, never sassier, rides the line between the outrageous and the endearing with a great deal of energy. Despised by the more sedate office women, she's brazen, loud and here's the funny thing smart. Yeah, smart. Under the curves, Erin has a brain. It's numbers-driven she can memorize endless phone lists, for example but it's shrewd, and it hatches possibilities. And, as the movie makes clear, it's happily uncontaminated by education. Erin sees things the professionals would miss; she feels things the professionals wouldn't acknowledge. Best of all, Erin does something the professionals can never quite bring themselves to do: She listens.
When Erin leans forward and her eyes fix on you, you can feel her soul opening to yours. For Erin, it's no trick. That's just Erin she didn't have to learn how to fake sincerity. She was sincere.
Asked by Masry to do some legwork on a pro bono case involving a utility purchasing a house in an agricultural zone far from L.A., Erin learns that the whole neighborhood is a blighted zone. With her gift for numbers and her quick grasp of chemistry, she discovers a water table so infected with chromium that it has shattered the health of all who have lived there. She requests some time to "investigate," and the lawyer distractedly says yes and then is astonished when she stops showing up at the office. He fires her. But when he finally examines her work post-firing he realizes she has a great instinct for investigation, a hunter's patience and that gold-plated gift of empathy.
So ever so soon, they're a team Roberts's sass plays so well with Finney's bluster, a kind of father-daughter ragtime. But the movie insists on seeing Erin, the whole woman; contrapuntal to the escalating case against the utility, it plays out her romantic life with a decent boy next door (Aaron Eckhart) who happens to ride a Harley and wear a lot of leather, and happens to care deeply for her kids.
The movie, smartly directed by Steven Soderbergh, is solid evidence that he has the chops to be a major commercial director, though it occasionally stoops to cheap shots. At one point, after Finney has sold a half-interest in the case to a larger, slicker firm (evidently common legal practice), the movie plays a crude game of one-upmanship in which Roberts's earth-mother moves play off against a big-time lawyer who is portrayed as a frostbitten princess who won't step into the mud in her heels and tells people she's deposing, "Please don't indulge in the sentimental." She's so idiotic that she can't be believed.
And then there's the crass materialism that underlies the film. There's no doubt that Brockovich represents virtue and that the utilities are on the side of narrow-focused pragmatism. But the movie so baldly celebrates the financial remuneration involved at $333 million, it was the biggest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history, according to the film's publicists that it comes to feel indecent. Its emotional climax arrives when Erin gets an even bigger bonus than she expected. It's as if she's just won the big one and that's Regis, not her employer, congratulating her.
Well, all right. But how much nicer if Erin took more pleasure in the good that she had done instead of the money she had made.
Pictures from the movie "Erin Brockovich":
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"What's nice about my dating life is that I don't have to leave my house. All I have to do is read the paper: I'm marrying Richard Gere, dating Daniel Day-Lewis, parading around with John F. Kennedy, Jr., and even Robert De Niro was in there for a day. "
-Julia Roberts -