Erin Brockovich, a law unto herself

Of all Steven Soderbergh’s films Erin Brockovich is his most mainstream and accessible, the kind of true-story David and Goliath tale that’s likely to be written off as a crowd-pleaser. For one thing, it’s very much a Julia Roberts vehicle. She plays Erin, a twice-divorced mother of three who elbows her way into a clerical job with a small law firm and ends up spearheading a case in which a large utility company is accused of exposing people living near one of its plants to dangerous amounts of toxic chromium. On almost every level the film is an exceptional work of craftsmanship: Soderbergh’s disarmingly accomplished direction, Susannah Grant’s sparkling script, Ed Lachman’s subtle cinematography. But it’s Roberts’ brassy performance that is its mainstay, a striking return to her best form after Runaway Bride strained to shoehorn her trademark charms into an unsuitably nasty role.

If Erin Brockovich – with its richly drawn central character – seems good fresh material for Roberts, it’s a far less obvious choice for Soderbergh. Interviewed in Sight and Sound last year, the director described the just-completed film as “an aggressively linear reality-based drama about a twice-married mother of three living at a very low income level.” Put that way it sounds almost like documentary realism – the maverick Soderbergh’s chance to emulate, say, Ken Loach while he can still cash in on the goodwill of the studios earned by his mainstream success with Out of Sight (1998) and The Limey (1999).

That Soderbergh might want to dabble in such commercially marginalised territory is not so remarkable a proposition. Never one to hide his stylistic debts to 60s auteurs (his pitch for The Limey was “Get Carter remade by Alain Resnais”), he paid Loach an extensive tribute when he used extracts from Poor Cow (1967) as flashbacks in The Limey. But if such a restless stylist seems an unlikely addition to the ranks of the anonymous but proficient filmmakers Roberts has favoured in the past – Chris Columbus, Garry Marshall et al – Erin Brockovich is still a blazingly entertaining $51 million Julia Roberts feelgood vehicle.

Roberts herself is one of the most self-aware actresses at work today, well known for assiduously cultivating and managing her public persona. Julia Roberts films tend to encourage certain assumptions about the characters she plays, and Roberts and Soderbergh use these assumptions from the outset. Rather than the long-legged sophisticate we might expect, Erin is the kind of woman who wears push-up bras and tiny tops to the office. Her hair has that sheen-like, over-processed look. Given her appearance, there’s no way most people wouldn’t make a snap judgement about her intelligence.

The first clue that our preconceptions are wrong comes in the first scene when Erin, desperate to find work, explains to the doctor interviewing her for a medical secretary’s job that she knows something about medicine from watching nurses tend to her children. The doctor isn’t sold, of course, but that doesn’t stop Erin. Breathlessly she tells him of another job she once held: “I fell madly in love with geology.”

The non sequitur completely throws the doctor, even though it’s clear he’s already dismissed her as a candidate. For there’s something about the way Erin declares her interest that suggests tenacity rather than loopiness. The words have tumbled out even before she’s assessed whether or not they amount to a good idea. Her eyes gleam almost madly. She flashes that sun-drenched smile. She’s part snake-oil saleswoman (she really needs that job) but she’s also revealing something true about herself: that she’s capable of passionate engagement in working life. She seems to crave that kind of commitment. We see her leave the doctor’s office, spilling out of her miniature top and swearing under her breath as she breaks a fingernail unlocking her car door. We’re so clearly being invited to think of her as a flighty, bubble-headed floozy it’s almost a joke.

But to some extent Erin is everything she seems. She’s not wearing those clothes out of cluelessness, she likes to look sexy in that way. Once she finally gets a job with a law firm, her boss Ed Masry (a cantankerous Albert Finney) catches her working through her lunch hour and advises her to tone down her wardrobe if she wants to keep on friendly terms with the other office “girls”. She regards him coolly, then lets the axe fall: “Well, it just so happens, I think I look nice. And as long as I have one ass instead of two, I’ll wear what I want, if that’s all right with you.”

What’s irresistible about this dichotomy is that it makes Erin a metaphor for the movie itself: just as her colleagues refuse to acknowledge that a struggling lower-class woman with a gloriously uninhibited taste in fashion might possess the intelligence to follow through a complex legal case, so Erin Brockovich the mainstream crowd-pleaser has its own sophisticated core. There’s a heightened level of awareness that springs from Roberts having at last found a role that puts both her charm and her edginess to good use; and from the intuitiveness and sensuality with which Soderbergh directs.

Take his sensitive approach to class. Some of the film’s most compelling scenes take place among the blue-collar residents of Hinkley, the town whose water supply is allegedly being polluted by a neighbouring industrial complex owned by Pacific Gas & Electric. These people have contracted various forms of cancer and Erin needs their help in the suit she’s preparing against the utility company. Here Soderbergh’s clear-eyed and unsentimental direction is well served by Lachman’s understated camerawork which neither glamorises these less-than-prosperous lives nor wallows in their desperation. As Erin travels from client to client along roads stretching through lonely, desert-like vistas, you wonder why anyone would choose to live here. But these places – the plant’s low-budget Emerald City of rigging and cooling towers, for instance – are presented simply as the stuff of people’s lives, places they happen to pass on their way to somewhere else.

While it would be a stretch to say that with such scenes Soderbergh approaches something like a Ken Loach film, his character-based naturalism is wonderfully unforced. There’s no modish fascination with the bric-a-brac of ordinariness. For once Middle America isn’t played out as a vast fashion shoot and there’s none of the misanthropic anthropology of Todd Solondz or Larry Clarke.

A more obvious point of comparison is Michael Mann’s The Insider. Like Mann’s compelling true-to-life film about corporate whistle blowing, Erin Brockovich sees two small-time players – Brockovich and lawyer Masry – ranged against the faceless might of a big corporation. It’s easy to dismiss Brockovich as the lighter companion piece to Mann’s lengthy and demanding film. Where in The Insider most of the action is confined to shadowy boardrooms and the perpetual night of television editing suites, Brockovich is dappled with the soft daylight of Southern California, delighting in the wide-open spaces and utterly unremarkable stretches of downtown LA. There’s none of The Insider’s tightly coiled intensity.

As a chamber piece centred on investigative journalist Al Pacino and whistle-blower Russell Crowe, The Insider inhabits a closed-off world where the issue at hand – that the tobacco firm Crowe worked for lied about levels of nicotine addiction – becomes a near-irrelevant pretext for a meditation on integrity, trust, responsibility and the consequences of telling unwelcome truths. All of which makes for a richly dramatic experience, but Mann sometimes skates too close to solipsism. In order to be truly tested, it’s as if Crowe’s character has to become the unbreaking, ungiving loner so beloved of Mann’s other films.

There’s no such ducking of the issues in Brockovich. Erin’s involvement in the lawsuit is bound up with the practicalities of caring for her children, a necessity that plunges us into social and emotional complexities that The Insider(in which Crowe’s single-minded determination sees him abandoned by his wife and children) shunts to one side. The relationship Erin strikes up with George (Aaron Eckhart), the good-natured biker who lives next door, takes the pressure off her for a while – he looks after the kids while she works. George explains why: “I like hanging out with kids. They keep it simple.” The look of disbelief on Erin’s face says it all – as a working lone parent her life is marked by complications at every level. Inevitably George’s notion of responsibility turns out to be far less rooted than hers. There’s a moment when George, coming home from an errand with Erin’s kids in tow, longingly watches a procession of motorbikes rev past. Not long afterwards he’s back on his Harley, chewing up the open road in a sham version of independence and leaving Erin to juggle work and childcare once more.

But even when George is “being the maid” – as he puts it – the film remains sensitive to Erin’s tradeoffs. Exhausted after a long day’s work, she rings him on her cell phone to find out how his day went. He tells her that her youngest has said her first word. Erin’s face starts to crumple – how could she have missed such a significant moment? But as George describes how it happened Roberts’ moonglow smile radiates. Soderbergh has his character take second-hand pleasure in the event rather than milking her regret at missing it.

It’s moments like these that make you realise Soderbergh was in fact a perfect choice to make a Julia Roberts movie. More than any other US director working today, he seems open to the charisma of his actors. But his approach is usually deliberately skewed. In Out of Sight he cast matinee-idol dreamboat George Clooney in the role of an escaped con smitten with the federal marshal, played by Jennifer Lopez, who is trying to put him behind bars. But Clooney’s character is the one who’s ruled by his emotions (what Soderbergh has described as the “woman’s” role) while Lopez’s insists on going by the book. With The Limey he undercut another great fallacy of contemporary movies – that actors over a certain age can’t be sexy – by casting Terence Stamp as an ex-con whose glamour quotient seems to have flowered in jail. In some respects The Limey is among the most knowing of recent films about stardom: it trades ironically on the iconic status of 60s veterans Stamp and co-star Peter Fonda to enhance its tale of hippie idealism gone nasty in 90s LA.

Erin Brockovich plays it straighter. It’s a defiantly old-fashioned star vehicle that’s more George Cukor than any of the 60s auteurs Soderbergh idolises. And after her mushy roles in Stepmom and Runaway Bride and the ice princess of Notting Hill, it’s a delight to see Roberts reaffirm her talent for subtlety. Relishing the chance to play a plausibly real person – albeit someone whom the strain of everyday life fails to deglamorise – she is visibly re-energised by Soderbergh’s direction and Grant’s crackling script. A confident and subtle film, Erin Brockovich is easy to underestimate. When a coldly professional, buttoned-down lawyer tries to do the same with Erin herself, she earns a killer comeback that has Erin’s witheringly quick, self-aware attitude stamped all over it: “Lady, all you got is two wrong feet and fucking ugly shoes.”