Re-released 25 years on, this is the true story of David-and-Goliath underdog heroism that was repurposed for the movies by screenwriter Susannah Grant and director Steven Soderbergh. Brockovich is the gutsy working-class woman, played by the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts, who gets a job as a paralegal and senses that local people are getting exploited – so without any professional training becomes the American Boudicca of class-action lawsuits, leading the charge against a Californian utility company that is poisoning the groundwater and causing hundreds of families to get sick. Her affectionate, exasperated boss Ed Masry is played with vigour by Albert Finney; Aaron Eckhart is her on-off boyfriend George, and Brockovich herself has a cameo as a waitress.
Revisited now, Erin Brockovich looks like an old-fashioned Hollywood A-list vehicle. It is essentially a feelgood, earnest story with some quaintly fabricated social-realist details and a serious but carefully controlled un-depressing tone. Roberts sails through all this with her own unmistakable charm and athletic ease, effectively playing her Pretty Woman persona a decade or so on, as Erin cheerfully uses her cleavage to get her way. Masry asks how she miraculously persuaded a male librarian to let her have sensitive documents; Erin replies: “They’re called boobs, Ed!” Roberts is always watchable, although the megawatt glare of Julia Roberts’s movie-star glamour means that you’re never exactly going to mistake this “Erin Brockovich” for an ordinary mortal.
From our vantage point, there are certain things that look dated. A remake might not allow Erin to yell back at a plus-size legal assistant: “Bite my ass, Krispy Kreme!” The film is also distinctly sunny in way that feels a little sucrose, almost as if there isn’t a problem that can’t be dissolved by Erin’s optimistic Colgate smile or shamed away by her scowl. She is menaced at one stage by an anonymous caller on the phone, but that’s it; the worries and the cares that she has are all about her domestic situation.
It certainly feels very different from, say, Todd Haynes’s 2020 legal drama Dark Waters which is exactly that: dark. There is also Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 from 2018 about the poisoned water in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The moment here in which Erin pointedly offers someone a glass of the local water actually put me in mind of the scene in Moore’s film in which Barack Obama somewhat unconvincingly drinks a glass of Flint water as a way of mollifying the crowd.
There is one aspect of Erin Brockovich that still feels current: the awful moment when well-meaning lawyers have to talk to a roomful of angry people, and explain that it might be a good idea to take the bad guys’ increased offer of settlement and not gamble on going to trial and losing everything. There was something rather similar in the recent Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Erin Brockovich is a study in Hollywood optimism, and Roberts sells it hard.
• Erin Brockovich is in UK cinemas from 7 March.
