True Fairy Tale from Toxic Tort Country

Rating: Null/10 (22 April 2000)

Lightweight legal drama with a feel-good ending enlivened by a sparkling script and good chemistry between the leads. I say legal drama, though the courtroom scenes are brief, because it is largely an account of the real Ms Brockovich's legwork (in more than one sense) that brought about the largest toxic tort settlement to date. The victims were the unlucky inhabitants of a small Mojave desert town, Hinkley, California, many of whom were seriously affected by the release into their environment of a poisonous industrial chemical, hexavalent chromium. The villain was Pacific Gas and Electric, the power utility. Erin Brockovich, a single mother with three young children who had bullied Ed Masry, the aging accident lawyer who had just lost her road accident compensation case, into giving her a paralegal job, found a file relating to a Hinkley land purchase by P G &E, which had some unusual features, and started digging. She rounded up over 600 claimants, stacks of evidence (including the proverbial smoking gun), and achieved a remarkable reasonably prompt result - $333 million in damages from a $28 billion dollar corporation.
The fictional account of this engaging story naturally goes out of its way to tug on the heartstrings so we get lots of Ms B's private life  financial worries, job-hunting blues, childcare problems and the ups and downs of her relationship with George, a sweet-natured biker. The real interest in the story is in two things. One, her remarkable people skills ranging from flashing her ample cleavage to get co-operation from a records clerk to establishing real empathy with the abused victims of P G &E, a skill few lawyers possess. (Like a lot of good lawyers she does possess an excellent memory.) The second is her relationship with Ed, the old crash and bash man, who she irritates into winning the case of his life, long after it seemed forensic glory had passed him by. Ed is not driven by lust (he's a bit old for that) but is shamed into action, and after a while he realizes that Erin has got what it takes, even though he treats her shabbily on occasion.

Julia Roberts as Erin and Albert Finney as Ed are a curious combination. It was odd to cast Finney, an English actor with a strong regional accent, as a Southern Californian ambulance-chaser with maybe a middle eastern background. Julia Roberts makes the transition from romantic comedy heroine to a more character-driven role with ease and she and Finney bounce off each other very satisfactorily without Finney seeming to want to lay a hand on her, despite her provocative dress sense. Stephen Soderbergh, who dealt with kinky Southern sex in `Sex, Lies and Videotape', has made a pretty orthodox piece here, but it is well done and many of the minor characters are well filled out. Aaron Eckhart is very appealing, if a little too good to be true, as George. One of the real judges in the case repeats his role on film and Erin herself appears briefly as a waitress in a fast food outlet who has no trouble remembering complicated orders.
Poor old P G & E. really get it in the neck. Although they are exposed as having attempted early on to defeat the Hinkley inhabitants' legal rights by a tactical confession of their sins, the subsequent conduct of the matter by their representatives indicates a very stupid bunch indeed  not even smart enough to be called evil (compare `Silkwood'). Unlike John Travolta in `Class Action' who had Robert Duvall as his Big Corporate nemesis, Erin and Ed lacked a worthy opponent. This rather reduces the dramatic tension, but the real-life Erin and Ed obviously know they are on to a good thing  they are now doing their best to drive up power bills even further by suing P G&E over another toxic tort elsewhere in California.