Feature Review

Erin Brockovich

** 1/2

It's a good story: Erin Brockovich, a former Miss Wichita and young single-mother stumbles upon a secret environmental disaster and spearheads the legal battle on behalf of the sick and dying. Make that a great story--with only one small defect--it's true. As this film was made in the first place--the victory of the onscreen Brockovich (Julia Roberts) is all but inevitable. While assured outcomes are commonplace in cinema, such movies must rely on spectacle or drama to attain greatness. Erin Brockovich supplies neither in any admirable way--relying on Robert's breasts for the spectacle and alternating between episodes of her telling people off or feeling their pain for the drama.

This isn't the story of the people of Hinkley, a small desert town on the outskirts of the Californian Mojave Desert, who were poisoned by groundwater contaminated by the Pacific Gas & Electric--and who were then lied to by the company's suits who told them that they were using a non-harmful variety of chromium in an attempt to wear out the statute of limitations on their crime.

Instead, as the title proudly proclaims, it is the story of Erin Brockovich. That itself is not necessarily damning--but rather than employing the real-life character as a vehicle with which to tell the story, the director, Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape and Out of Sight), allows Robert's presence to dominate the film and overshadow plot with mannerism. Although the bratty language and low-cut vinyl vests may be a page out of Brockovich's diary, Roberts transforms them with her Hollywood body and overacting into a beast that is very much her own. This is the story of Julia Roberts playing Erin Brockovich.

That isn't to say that the movie is wholly disinteresting. The true nature of the story and its adaptation add certain complexities to the mix--though Soderbergh does little in the way of recognizing or using these complexities to barely raise this film's awareness above that of a Lifetime Original.

Surprisingly, Robert's character is not all that likable. She is not so much the outspoken woman that they promised us, but a self-important little child who refuses to grow up. While Brockovich may be an unemployed single mother and therefore pitiable-she is not necessarily a sympathetic character.

But would we still be asking these questions had Brockovich been a man? I would hope so--but unfortunately Erin Brockovich beats us to the double-standard punch. Women in the film who work for or with the system receive undue vitriol from Roberts who views them as traitors, or at any rate, worse than the men who are doing the same things. While gender roles are called into question, the cardboard characters lack the depth necessary to confer any real meaning or political overtones. There is a great line near the end of the movie where Roberts validates the work of stay at home parents everywhere, which is even more impressive considering that it is directed towards a man. But the film repeatedly flubs this as it constantly rebukes minor characters for seeing Brockovich as nothing more than a sex-kitten, while it is quite clear that she sees herself that way, and has no qualms with exploiting that for her own gain when the need arises.

Erin Brockovich is the perfect film for an American audience. In a country that both despises lawyers and yet is fascinated with courtroom ordeals, Brockovich one-ups the traditional underdog story with a courtroom drama that stars someone who isn't even a lawyer. With films like this one, The Rainmaker, and The Hurricane with their calculated endings that are more saccharine sweet than bittersweet--filmgoers can be outraged by very real injustices which are neatly solved, so that viewers can slink back into complacency on their ride home to suburbia.

It is a paranoid fantasy of mine that these films are financed by the corporate world to do precisely that. Just as Pacific Gas & Electric paid for doctors to treat the citizens of Hinkley, doctors who would tell them that their sicknesses had nothing to do with the chromium that their factories were pumping into the ground--these films spur us not towards challenging the ways in which we are being victimized but instead leave us with the feeling that somehow, everything is still all peachy. It is telling that Erin Brockovich ends not with the eyes of the young girl who has undergone a hysterectomy, but with Julia Roberts prancing about: happy that at least the girl got some cash out of it.

by Richard Leader