Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her starring role in Erin Brockovich. As we re-evaluate the cinema of 2000, does it stand the test of time?
This is the latest in AJ Black’s series of features on films released in the year 2000. He previously looked back at Brian de Palma’s sci-fi drama, Mission To Mars. Potential spoilers lie ahead…
Erin Brockovich was the first true success story of the year 2000. Not only was it critically appreciated, with a celebrated and eventually Oscar-winning performance from Julia Roberts, it was also a remarkable commercial hit, netting a quarter of a billion dollars world wide and in the top 15 box office films, globally, of the entire year.
It was, in a real sense, a trend-setter in that regard. This is Roberts at the peak of her game as an A-list Hollywood icon, able to open a film on both her name and that of the character she portrays in this simple but effective David versus Goliath story. Or, as Albert Finney’s lawyer Ed Masry puts it, “David versus Goliath’s entire family.”
It’s a narrative given extra weight and depth by its strong through-line of female empowerment. This isn’t just a gift of a role for an actor like Roberts; it’s also a charm of a character – a real-life, genuine modern heroine who fought the system and won, a tale director Steven Soderbergh and writer Jennifer Grant never embellish. It’s a remarkable story enough based on the facts.
For Erin Brockovich to make such a powerful dent in the global box office attests to multiple things at the turn of the century; the continued, key importance of star wattage to open a movie (Tom Hanks would pull a similar trick with 2000’s Cast Away) and a clear audience appetite for female-driven, progressive cinema.
In the age just before the birth of the franchise movie beyond certain cult sub-genres, Erin Brockovich was proof that true-life films with the right combination of talent – both in front of and behind the camera – strong word of mouth, and perhaps a reactive element against the emptier big-budget blockbuster could be profitable.
It undoubtedly paved the way for the mid-2000s fusion of pop-culture blockbuster and auteur-driven drama as typified by Christopher Nolan and, indeed, Soderbergh himself. Erin Brockovich’s legacy is a strong one.
Soderbergh was himself in the middle of a successful career renaissance even before he lit up the box office with his commercially (if not always critically) successful Ocean’s trilogy across the remainder of the decade. Erin Brockovich oddly feels like a move away, stylistically, from his most recent films. It was also a fruitful creative experience, as the filmmaker explained to the Directors Guild of America in 2014.
“Erin is probably the most pleasurable shoot I ever had,” Soderbergh said. “It was the kind of movie I hadn’t made before, and just sort of bearing witness to what [Julia Roberts] was doing every day was so much fun. For the first four weeks, we were all in this Holiday Inn in Barstow and I’d come back covered in dirt every day, just smiling.”
After his breakout thriller at the end of the 1980s, Sex, Lies and Videotape, Soderbergh refused to pin himself down to one genre. He made the avant garde biopic Kafka, meta comedy Schizopolis, a stab at film noir with The Underneath, all before hitting the cultural jackpot with Elmore Leonard adaptation Out Of Sight, in which George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in one of the defining films of the 90s.
Defiantly hard to pigeonhole, Soderbergh refused to make the same film twice, and Erin Brockovich is probably his most relaxed and character-driven film up to this point. The script and performances do the heavy lifting, while Soderbergh’s camera languishes in the pre-Breaking Bad, dappled Nevada desert sun and parched landscape, reflecting the key factor of poisoned water callously deployed by a heartless corporation our hero fights to expose.
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It’s worth considering Julia Roberts’ career at this point, as she too was in the middle of a popular and successful creative period. A year earlier saw her reap critical and commercial acclaim as an emotionally stunted A-list Hollywood actress in Richard Curtis’ surprisingly delightful Notting Hill, which many wondered might be some kind of meta commentary on her stardom to date. There was also in Runaway Bride – another romantic comedy which mined Roberts’ innate talent for all-American, screwball charm and beauty.
Roberts spent the 90s balancing these kinds of crowd-pleasing films with more serious fare for esteemed directors such as Alan J Pakula, Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan – films that cemented her status as more than just a marquee name. And while not her biggest box office hit, Erin Brockovich is arguably the project that fuses her audience appeal with a straight-up tremendous performance.
With Soderbergh’s direction necessarily unobtrusive, it’s on Roberts to carry the film, even with able support from legendary character actor Albert Finney (himself in the midst of a career renaissance of sorts). She pulls it off. Roberts imbues Erin with a likeable vivacity that pulls the audience in, even when she’s difficult and irascible. Erin is a single mother with the odds stacked against her, a woman who feels the system is rigged and no man – not even one as good natured as Aaron Eckhart’s kindly biker – is going to get her out of it. She’s self-reliant, capable, defiant and brassy, even down to her refusal to modify her low cut tops and high heels for the more demure colleagues she works with.
“As long as I have one ass instead of two I’ll wear what I like if that’s all right with you,” she says. The more she fights the power, the more you root for her.
Make no mistake: this is a film centred around social injustice, with the added punch of ‘the little woman’ fighting back against a corporate, male-dominated world. Erin is constantly challenging that sense of entitled patriarchy, whether it’s trying to enforce on her a dress code, or as with Peter Coyote’s hotshot lawyer, swooping in to take away all the work she has undertaken exposing the crimes of energy conglomerate PG&E, and how much she has engendered herself with the victimised families who see her as a modern folk hero.
“For the first time in my life, I got people respecting me,” she says. “Please, don’t ask me to give it up”. The amount she has to beg and plead with the men surrounding her who try and steer her destiny is disheartening, but the way Erin fights back with dignity and strength, overcoming vulnerability to do it, is enormously rewarding to watch.
One of the reasons Soderbergh’s film works so well is that it’s not designed to be outwardly cathartic. Unlike a film such as The Hurricane, which hinged on a climactic point of justice, Erin Brockovich is less about bringing down a corporation and more about Erin proving she can survive against the odds and make something of herself amidst a rigged system in a man’s world.
You could argue this is a feminist film, an argument I will leave to people more qualified than I to make, but it stands out at a point in cinema where you didn’t often see women in such strong, unashamedly feminine roles. There are moments where Roberts gets to deliver a rebuke against corrupt power – particularly one scene where she tears a few board members apart – but the air punching beat at the conclusion is not about the enemy but Erin’s own personal accomplishment, and a joyfully comic one at that. It is feel good without a sense of righteous anger, even when justice is done.
Erin Brockovich was part of a remarkable year for Soderbergh, in which two of his films were eventually nominated for Best Director Oscars. The other was Traffic, which we’ll explore at the end of the year, and for which he won. Erin Brockovich might be his most restrained and oddly mainstream film outside of his venture into the glossy blockbuster, however. It’s a star vehicle biopic in which one woman beats the odds and doesn’t just win, but also finds purpose and respect.
The fact it also did excellent box office, proving female-led dramas could make money, was the cherry on the cake. Erin Brockovich was of the best films of 2000. It’s also, arguably, one of the most important and influential dramas of the past few decades.
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