Movie Reviews

It's amazing how entertaining a movie about a single mother working for a law firm and investigating water pollution can be. But Erin Brockovich is an incredibly entertaining, fast-paced movie that never seems to drag during it's two hours and fifteen minutes of length.

Julia Roberts plays the title character -- a single mother with three young children, barely any money, and a severe lack of job-finding skills. When a lawyer fails to win Erin any sort of damages after she gets into a car-accident, Erin more-or-less 'guilt-trips' him into giving her a job at the law firm. When sorting through a bunch of real-estate files one day, she finds it strange that health records and blood-test readings are bunched in together with real-estate information. She talks to a few people in the neighbourhood, and ultimately comes to believe that a large nearby corporation has been polluting the town's groundwater for decades, and lying about it for just as long.

Yeah, on the surface it doesn't sound particularly interesting, but there's a lot of elements in the film that work together to make it so good. For instance, there's something very cool about a large,faceless corporation being forced to pay up to all the innocent people it's harmed in the past. In terms of acting, Julia Roberts is excellent. She does a very good job of playing an energetic, independant woman who seems to be coming to the end of her financial rope. Albert Finney is great as the owner of the law firm that hires Erin. We can tell that he's somewhat put off by Erin's abrasive attitude, but he's also more than a little intrigued by her. Aaron Eckhart is pretty cool as the biker-guy who moves in next door to Erin.

Editing isn't something that many people (me included) think very much about when watching a movie. This, however, is a film that I believe has noticeably-great editing. I love how Steven Soderbergh will set up a scene, have his characters initiate some kind of action, then immediately cut to the completion of that action. It's a great, "economical" sort of trick, that communicates to the viewer everything that needs to be said, without bogging us down with the 'middle bits'. It might very likely be this sort of filmmaking that helps to make the film move along so briskly.

If you haven't seen Erin Brockovich yet because you think it might just be some kind of uninteresting "chick flick", I can assure you it's much better than that.