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"Erin Brockovich" | page 1, 2, 3
The most straightforward piece of direction Soderbergh has ever done, "Erin Brockovich" has none of the tricky, jumbled time scheme he used in "Out of Sight" or "The Limey." But his work is much too distinctive to be mistaken for that of a hired hand. In some ways Soderbergh is as impatient as his heroine. He tells the story on the move. He adores jump cuts, shifting camera angles, anything to keep a scene hopping. And yet, overall, the movie suggests that Soderbergh is moving toward that place where craft becomes invisible. The meanings Soderbergh wants to convey here have saturated the movie's texture: This is surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever. And it couldn't have come at a better time. Even those of us who are doing OK financially may feel a little alienated when we turn on the evening news and hear the booming economy talked of as if it were a pervasive, incontrovertible fact. (And in an election year, the claims are only going to get bigger.) Without forcing a thing, without anybody making any speeches, Soderbergh shifts you back to the realities that kind of rhetoric can't contain: that for some people, something as simple as their child's cough is enough to get them wondering if this is the thing that will wipe out their finances. Working with brilliant cinematographer Ed Lachman (who also shot "The Limey"), Soderbergh presents the artifacts of working-class life with a matter-of-factness that neither turns them into kitsch, looks down on them, nor revels in drabness as a badge of integrity. The details of Erin's scrubby little house, and the houses of the people of Hinkley, feel right on the money, bearing both what writer Karal Ann Marling once called "the scars of living ... the marks of hard use" and the comforts people adopt to smooth over those scars. Soderbergh doesn't romanticize the working class. He's willing to let his characters be people like any others, succumbing to the same petty slights and snobberies as anyone. In his recent pictures, Soderbergh's trademark has become indelible actors' moments. As the first woman to join the lawsuit, Marg Helgenberger has one that rocks you back on your heels. While trying to keep denying Erin's persuasive claim that PG&E lied about the safety of the town's water, Helgenberger suddenly leaps up and orders her daughter out of the pool. It's a comic moment at which you don't dare laugh; the way Helgenberger suddenly gives in to her worst fears completely blurs the line between hysteria and common sense. It's hard to imagine that "Erin Brockovich" won't be the hit it deserves to be. And it's certainly more proof that Soderbergh continues to bring to mainstream filmmaking a revitalizing level of craft and inventiveness. (A friend of mine referred to him recently as "the hip Howard Hawks.") I wish I didn't suspect that after the initial burst of good reviews, we're in for the critical backlash that's inevitable whenever a director who has been a critics' favorite makes a thoroughly accessible picture. There's an ugly free-floating hostility in some critical circles right now that equates the emotionally accessible with the artistically reactionary. The spate of good movies and fascinating, ambitious failures in the last months of 1999 prompted all sorts of talk about American movies being at the dawn of a new renaissance of filmmaking. The talents of the best young filmmakers out there may yet make that true, just as an earlier generation of directors made it true in the '70s. On the other hand, if this new era of cinema is represented by "Fight Club," who needs it? The trouble with all the anticipatory talk of a new era of filmmaking is that it makes it both easy and fashionable for critics to dismiss movies that are accessible, as if accessibility were the same thing as tired formula. The critics who complained that David O. Russell's sensational "Three Kings" grew conventional in the second half missed how the film uses the form of a classic adventure to express new attitudes and realities. There's no reason that pictures in a familiar form or genre can't still be satisfying if they are made with craft and taste, like "The Cider House Rules," the loveliest example of classical Hollywood filmmaking in years. I'm waiting to see which nitwit will be the first to dismiss "Erin Brockovich" because things actually turn out well, or because it reminds him or her of "Norma Rae" or "A Civil Action" and, well, doesn't that mean it has been done? But "Erin Brockovich" reminds you that what makes a movie good boils down to the choices that have gone into it. A subject may be familiar, but our emotional response can be wholly fresh if the execution is fresh. It would be the ultimate irony if some critics made the same mistake about this movie that the characters in it make about its heroine -- dismissing "Erin Brockovich" because they judge by appearance and decide they've seen this type before.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories $20 million tears Forget about the doe eyes and the megawatt smile -- Julia Roberts' real knack is for suffering. And that, in Hollywood, is priceless.
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