Before
Erin Brockovich begins, a title tells us that
the film is based on a true story. The movie, directed by
Steven Soderbergh and written by transparently feminist Susannah
Grant, focuses on numbers, though the tagline is "She brought
a small town to its feet and a huge corporation to its knees."
After a physician runs into her car in North Hollywood, Erin
(played by Julia Roberts) engages attorney Ed Masry (played
by Albert Finney), but comes up with nothing because she is
too foul-mouthed to be a witness on her own behalf. Next,
Erin tells her next-door neighbor George (played by Aaron
Eckhart), a Harley-Davidson aficionado, that she has three
children (two girls and a boy), two ex-husbands, no job, and
that he should not bother to think about trying to score with
her despite her insistence on thrusting her boobs into his
eyes (and everyone else's in the film) as often as possible,
though in due course he baby-sits her children and falls in
love with her. In pursuit of employment, she barges into Masry's
law firm and demands a job, whereupon she is hired on a trial
basis as a mere file clerk. Excluded from lunch with the female
employees, who dislike her low neckline and flashy miniskirts,
she uses her lunch time to peruse the files, and thus learns
of a pro bono case involving Donna Jensen (played by Marg
Helgenberger) in the desert town of Hinkley, California (near
Barstow), who is suing Pacific Gas & Electric because of health
problems presumed to be related to toxicity from the company's
waste dump in town. After visiting Hinkley to interview the
plaintiff, she becomes obsessed with the case against the
corporate giant that has lied to the residents. We see her
transformed from a seemingly scatterbrain loser (though a
former Miss Wichita) to a savvy crusader determined to get
justice for the townspeople, who are suffering from a variety
of disorders linked to hexavalent chromium (chromium-6) pollution
in the water supply, which causes immune suppression and is
manifest in the form of nosebleeds, headaches, cancer, leukemia,
and premature death. Soon, she is signing up 634 residents
of the town in a class-action lawsuit, obtaining documents
that prove the case, and an arbitration panel ultimately hands
out a $333 million settlement, the largest such direct-action
lawsuit in history, of which $133.2 million percent goes to
Masry, who in turn awards a bonus of $2 million to Erin, who
has become a paralegal. Titles at the end report that PG&E
claims to have no more toxic waste dumps, but that the law
firm (now Masry & Vititoe) is handling several environmental
lawsuits, including one at PG&E's dump at Kettleman City.
The film also points out that arbitration may be preferable
to lawsuits, since big corporations can tie up cases for many
years, leaving victims without compensation. One of the surprises
in the film is that in the early part of the film the real
Erin Brockovich-Ellis plays a waitress at a restaurant, apparently
wearing a "Julia" nametag, with real Ed Masry as a patron
nearby. In contrast with Erin's $2 million, Julia Roberts
was paid $20 million for her role, which peppers the film
with uproarious lines. With many similarities to A
Civil Action, which won the Political Film Society's
1998 award for best film on human rights, Erin Brockovich
has been nominated for the best film on human rights and for
the best film exposé, bringing new facts to light, in the
year 2000. MH
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want to comment on this film
