Three cheers for Julia!

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2000)

After countless fluffy roles in a number of alternately respectable or forgettable pictures, Julia Roberts has finally been given another substantive character to play, and a true-life one to boot; like the woman she portrays, once she sinks her teeth into something she never lets go. Roberts is a natural to play Brockovich, an effervescent though uncouth woman prone to low-cut tops and high-cut skirts in equal proportion. Struggling to raise three children after her second divorce, Erin's relentless job search is interrupted by a debilitating fender bender. Feeling slighted by her not entirely fruitful attorney (Albert Finney), she transforms his guilt into a full-time clerical position at his law firm. Forming the crux of the storyline is her discovery in a series of real estate case files some hundreds of illnesses plaguing the citizens of Hinkley, a small desert community north of Los Angeles. During her subsequent investigation, Erin's innate empathy and kinship for fellow blue-collar families inspires her to uncover a conspiracy by a multi-billion dollar public utility to dispel its liability for the community's failing health. What could have played as yet another weepy disease-of-the-week telefilm is invigorated by Roberts, Susannah Grant's snappy script and the on-target direction by Steven Soderbergh. Rarely bogged down by lulls of requisite exposition, "Erin Brockovich" is briskly carried aloft on the shoulders of no-holds-barred Roberts, who gleefully understands her character's motivation and relentlessly pursues her course, even at the risk of increasingly neglecting her children and current beau. Too-long missing from American cinema, this entry in the "triumph of the little guy" oeuvre is too irresistible to dislike and too satisfying to dismiss.