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 ERIN
BROCKOVICH IS NOMINATED FOR TWO AWARDS
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.
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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
OTHER
FILMS TO WATCH
As
reviewed on the website of the Political Film Society, Boiler
Room depicts the scam of telephone solicitation
for stocks, Not of This
World explains why woman become nuns, Beautiful
People traces the travails and ultimate happiness
of Bosnian refugees in London, and Deterrence
suggests a scenario in which the United States nukes Baghdad
in the year 2008.
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