Erin Brockovich at 20: how a grim true story became a glossy star vehicle
In 1989, Steven Soderbergh changed the independent film business forever with sex, lies and videotape. A decade later, he conquered Hollywood. But it’s important not to yaddayadda away the years in between, when his sophomore slump (1991’s Kafka) extended to a junior slump (1993’s King of the Hill) and a senior slump (1995’s The Underneath), and he seemed lost in a wilderness of his own design. Arguments can (and should) be made for his work during this period – the Depression-era drama King of the Hill is one of his best films, and all three are varied and conceptually adventurous – but Soderbergh himself felt so discombobulated by failure that he wrote, directed, starred, edited and photographed 1996’s Schizopolis, an experimental doodle, just to give his career a hard reboot. Two years later, he made the superb Elmore Leonard adaptation
Out of Sight for Universal Pictures, and he was off and running again.
When Soderbergh started 2000 with Erin Brockovich and ended it with Traffic, both earning him best director nominations at the Oscars (he won for the latter), it almost felt calculated, like he had made a bet with himself that he could pivot from indie iconoclast to commercial juggernaut over the course of a four-year period. As many of the era’s biggest stars – George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon chief among them – strolled out to the Fountains of the Bellagio in Las Vegas at the end of his Ocean’s Eleven remake in 2001, it was the capper to a time when Soderbergh had cracked the code, squaring his sensibility with mass-market entertainment.
Soderbergh would go back to the lab soon afterwards with the digital experimentation of Full Frontal and Bubble, and studio films such as Solaris and Ocean’s Twelve, which were much further afield. Now 20 years old, Erin Brockovich stands out as the closest Soderbergh has gotten to making an old-fashioned star vehicle, one that’s issue-driven to a point, but more about harnessing the power of Julia Roberts, who dominates every scene she’s in – which happens to be almost all of them. Soderbergh’s wizardry with the environmental procedural owes much to All the President’s Men, a touchstone
for many of his films about how complex systems work, from the drug war (Traffic) to viral outbreaks (Contagion) to financial fraud (The Laundromat). But he’s also doing for Roberts what Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore did for Ellen Burstyn or Norma Rae did for Sally Field, giving her a platform to be her best and biggest self.
Working through a succession of wardrobe changes to rival a pop star’s arena show, Roberts plays Brockovich as a casual-Friday provocateur who uses plunging necklines and miniskirts to terrorize her adversaries. And if that’s not enough to intimidate them, she backs it up with salty invective. As the film opens, she’s an unemployed single mother of three who’s trying to fake