Soderbergh...the Cukor of the Aughts?

Rating: Null/10 (25 March 2000)

You can't quite always be sure. Is Steven Soderbergh giving us the most radical upending of a female movie star since Godard's TOUT VA BIEN? Or is he just a poor lackey locked under the jail, forced to photograph scenes in which Big Star Julia tells off rich snooty lawyers in glamourous closeups? Whichever--I guess he's both--he's the guy who took what could have been a routine chick-flick script and made it into a nineties ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE.
Soderbergh--fast becoming one of our finest directors--is all about the fringes. He's all about the perfect telling throwaway set decoration, the little improv'd moment a kid has that falls away at the end of a scene, the handheld moment that just goes soft a little bit. And it's the fringes that put this movie over, not the rah-rah script by Susannah Grant. (In one scene, Erin Brockovich demonstrates that she has the phone numbers of six hundred plaintiffs committed to memory. "You want their diseases, too, Theresa?" Grant sometimes thinks she's doing a rewrite on SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT.) It's the Little People that Julia runs into--like Tracey Walter, as a guy who isn't what he seems. It's about the way the DP, the great Ed Lachman, makes everything feel so offhand, so yeah-whatever, and yet so very beautiful.
The producers--Danny DeVito and company--had a smart idea. It takes a Soderbergh to put a movie like this over the top--somebody who'll pull it down into the niceties of lived life, not a Joel Schumacher slickster who'd polish it up to the level of a Grisham movie. And the big payoff is that Julia Roberts gives a performance that's equally movie-star-like and conscientious about keeping it real. She is great at what she does. It's great to see growth in an overpaid movie star. From here on out, the sky's the limit--as, I hope, it shall be for that most modest yet most ingenious and fiendishly inventive of talents, Steven Soderbergh.