Not personal? That is my work! My sweat! My time away from my kids! If that's not personal, I don't know what is.

Rating: 9/10 (13 April 2020)

If you had told me that, years after I last watched Erin Brockovich (directed by Steven Soderbergh) with my mother on VHS, that I would like it more than Soderbergh's Traffic I probably wouldn't have believed you. It's quite impressive that he released both films in 2000 which I didn't know until now.
Directly after the release of 2017's Wonder Woman (directed by Patty Jenkins) there was a general sentiment that women finally had a true female superhero movie, summed up for me by a friend of a friend's post on social media talking about what she saw as the key difference between male and female superheroes; that the former often "saves the world" because it's the right thing to do whereas the latter tends to "save the world" as a byproduct of maternalistic instincts. For her it implied an ethical inferiority that female superheroes needed an endangered child to fuel their heroism.
At the time I thought it was an over-exaggerated reading of the roles, since it's not exactly uncommon that male superheroes do what they do because of romantic forces driving their heroism. In hindsight I admit that this friend of a friend had a point.
Erin Brockovich isn't the story of a superhero but it's perhaps the best example of a female hero doing what's right for its own sake and it goes even further than that because Erin Brockovich does the right thing at the direct expense of her maternalistic instincts. She doesn't fight for an entire community's justice because one of her kids also got sick or anything like that and due to her workload and efforts she risks alienating her children and even destroys a relationship with a man in the process of this story. I don't know of any other film like it, in that respect.
By contrast, Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman had no husband or children and so the fact that she "saves the world" for its own sake is made redundant because she has no maternal instinct to ignore and act in spite of.
While Erin Brockovich on its surface is a quintessential 'feminist film' it also turns the 'workaholic husband and alienated wife' trope in on itself, by placing a woman in the role of workaholic and a man in the role of unloved and alienated, which makes for some very interesting material. The film has us so engaged with Erin Brockovich's mission that we're not prepared for when her love interest doesn't understand the importance of her long work hours and why he feels hurt and alienated to the point of wanting to leave her.
This is something very few films try to convey, possibly because most films with this trope are geared towards a male audience and so we're just expected to side with the overworked husband. However, in this film Erin takes George (her love interest) with her to inform one of the sick townspeople that all their work has paid off and they will be receiving a payout of $5 million and before she does so, she tells him that this is what he helped her achieve by staying home and taking care of the kids all those lonely nights.
I wonder how many destroyed relationships would have remained intact if only the workoholic husband had shown his wife what she had helped to achieve by doing what needed to be done to allow him to work so much? People are much more content with sacrifice when they know it was for something, but why would anybody stick around if they think they suffered through alienation just so their husband could help their employers make more money?
As an aside, I really love the tone of this film. It captures a kind of blue-collar desperation and while the feminist overtones are very obvious, what truly resides at Erin Brockovich's core is a tale about classism and overcoming the forces of polite society, summed up perfectly for me when Erin Brockovich is told to wear longer skirts by the women in the office.