Release Date: March 17th, 2000Writer: Susannah Grant
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Logline: An unemployed single mother becomes a legal assistant and almost single handedly brings down a California power company accused of polluting a city's water supply. (Source: IMDb) Drama, Biography. 131 min.
Bechdel Test: Passed all 3 tests
Review
There's not a whole lot that can be said about a movie that was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and won the Best Actress Oscar that year. Sometimes a movie is just empirically good, and the biography of now famous Erin Brockovich is one of them.
For anyone who hasn't seen this film, find it and watch it. 14 years after it's release it still holds up. I know because I had never watched it until this review. What a scandal, I know. There are some movies that manage to tell timeless stories. It may take place at a certain point in time, but it doesn't trap itself within pop culture and challenges pervasive issues. That's why Erin Brockovich is great, if it was re-shot today it would be an identical movie. Except maybe with better cell phones.
There are so many reasons why Erin Brockovich succeeds. It's an underdog story, it's a justice story, but importantly it's a real people story. On paper, this could turn into a legal drama, simply about the battle between a small town and corporate pollution. Instead it's a realistic portrayal of a complex character struggling to earn respect in a social climate that frankly hasn't changed that much since the movie was made.
For me, it's the realistic part that empowers a drama like this. There's no magical moment where she becomes a better person for succeeding. She doesn't change into a legal professional by the end like they so easily could have portrayed, she's the same woman wearing leather skirts and chewing out her boss to stand for her principles.
Portrayal of Women: What Erin Brockovich does beautifully is hammer home the impact of the way society judges a woman.
It opens with her pitted against a corporate culture of conformity where your social ranking determines your quality of character. Her role as a single mother raising three kids doesn't credit her as being smart and responsible, if anything it's evidence of the opposite. How women are judged is based on their wardrobe. Being divorced twice discredited her to a jury of her peers. Erin is unemployed and she can't get experience because no one will take a chance on her. She has to fight for and demand every ounce of respect earned by the end.
Of course, she then turns the table on her neighbor George, a biker who she doesn't want around her kids, but even George can get a job and earn the respect that Erin never will. Similarly, as soon as Erin walks into that small town to interview people she is given more respect than any professional would. She doesn't judge them as being dumb based on how they speak, or as being simple for how they live. For that, they don't judge her for how she dresses. There's something massively gratifying in seeing that on screen if you've ever felt judged in that way.
Sisterhood Moment: "Well, seeing as how I've no brains or legal expertise ... I just went up there and preformed sexual favors. 634 blowjobs in 5 days. I'm really quite tired."
Rating: 5 times out of 5 you thought Aaron Eckhart was sexy even though he totally couldn't be, he's such a grease-bag.
IMDb - Erin Brockovich (7.3)
Wikipedia - Erin Brockovich
Rotten Tomatoes - Erin Brockovich (84%)
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