Back in 2000, Erin Brockovich was Steven Soderbergh operating at the very heart of Hollywood, post-Out of Sight, pre-Ocean's 11, updating what was once referred to as the women's picture, winning Julia Roberts the Oscar, and demonstrating how those instincts fostered in the independent sector could renew and reinvigorate the studio system. (Not bad going for a few weeks' work.) That reliable scribe Susannah Grant - post-Party of Five, pre-In Her Shoes - had written up the kind of true-life story that was once the domain of the common-or-garden afternoon TV movie: the tale of a blousy lawyer's clerk and single mother who stumbled across a notable story of corporate malfeasance and brought it to wider public attention. Soderbergh duly converted it into a socially engaged character study with real, old-school star power. This Brockovich was conceived as the millennial equivalent of a gumshoe in the pre-Internet era, going from place to place in a crappy car, uncovering evidence that suggested an energy company had been poisoning both the land and the people who lived on it; she was at once Nicholson in Chinatown and Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye, and further proof that the New New Hollywood of the late 1990s had determined to build on the New Hollywood of the early 1970s. She was also the right character for her particular moment in time: the movie landed shortly after the publication of Naomi Klein's No Logo and just before the release of the Canadian documentary The Corporation, when renewed doubts were being expressed about the ways and means by which our besuited paymasters go about maintaining the status quo. The irony, of course, is that she should have been platformed by a Sony-owned studio in a film that found its way into just about every multiplex in the world.
From the word go, we're back in sure hands. The venerable cinematographer Ed Lachman paints the screen in warm, sunny, inviting colours; Soderbergh still seems in close touch with how life is lived on the backstreets of California; Grant knows the people who inhabit these places, have these conversations and concerns, juggle work with daycare, are forever at the mercy of the powers-that-be. It's a movie that realises the importance of money, made by a creative who spent some formative part of his career grinding out films on a limited budget; it's also a movie that demonstrates a certain mastery of information, that senses, as any worthwhile anti-corporate text must, how it can be dammed up, but also how it leaks out regardless. Most crucially of all for its box-office prospects, it's a terrific Julia Roberts vehicle; rewatching it 25 years on, you realise with some sadness that she's not had a remotely comparable role since. Much as Erin covers a lot of ground, so too does this performance: Roberts gets to play credibly frazzled around the heroine's kids and bills, empathetic around the story's victims, mock-seductive with the corporate minions, flirty with biker neighbour George (Aaron Eckhart), combative with her on-off boss (Albert Finney, terrific as a man who doesn't quite know who he's got on his hands, but has the wisdom to acknowledge she's somebody special), and tenacious in the linking moments. It's one of those turns that really does contain multitudes, most dazzlingly the smile of an actress who knows she's onto a good thing. Cinephiles appraising Soderbergh's career have tended to prefer Out of Sight and the Ocean's saga, formally inventive as those projects were, but Erin Brockovich remains one for the movielovers, and quietly influential with it. Note the way its title has insistently recurred in the reviews for Netflix's recent release Toxic Town: it's become a shorthand, the best known modern example of a particular type of film. With reason, as this reissue makes clear.
Erin Brockovich returns to cinemas nationwide this weekend to mark International Women's Day.
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