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  Amy
  
Jankowicz
Erin Brockovich
USA, 2000
[Steven Soderbergh]
Julia Roberts, Albert Finney, Aaron Eckhart, Marg Helgenberger
Drama
  
Julia Roberts plays Erin Brockovich in the famously true story of a smalltown single mother taking on a multinational corporation in the biggest legal compensation claim in American history. Erin is stuck: two kids, no job, no support. The one thing she does have, however, is balls, and these she uses to great effect when she marches into the local legal firm and demands a job in a battle of wills with Ed Masry, who quickly and bemusedly becomes her newest employer.

Starting off hated by most of the company, she stumbles across information which implicates a local factory in the high incidence of leukaemia and cancer in the local community. She investigates further and so begins a highly satisfying David-and-Goliath story with humour and bite.

What it lacks, however, is pace, being a little overlong and not particularly well edited, without much visual creativity to keep interest up. Bright points are the lead characters of Erin and Ed, who manage to have a well-wrought screen relationship based entirely on personalities rather than Robert�s rather distracting style. Both are excellent at the subtle (his) and ball-breaking (hers) humour provided.

Social issues are dealt with nicely, with the single-working-mother line played in the way I always like it; neither over-idealistic, nor a message from the moral majority. As it is, it manages to reproduce the frustrations and �selfishness� of Erin�s choices (her boyfriend is ve-e-ery patient) while placing these in the wider social context in a way which questions the traditional social structure more effectively than it does women�s professional freedoms.

In the end it�s a little predictable as a story, and one wonders how much is actually true, but basically Roberts pulls out a fantastically snappy performance with a fair amount of depth thanks to a razor-sharp script and a compelling story.
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