Erin Brockovich (2000)
Sometimes going in completely blind is the best thing you can do for yourself. I had a poster in my head: Julia Roberts, a baby, what looked like a quiet family drama. Maybe a character study. Something gentle. What I actually got was a fiercely compelling, true-life legal thriller that had me hooked from the opening scene and barely let go until the credits rolled. That gap between expectation and reality is one of the great pleasures of watching films, and Erin Brockovich delivered it in spades.
Steven Soderbergh is a director I find genuinely fascinating, and if you want to see where his instincts were already razor-sharp, I'd point you towards sex, lies, and videotape as an earlier marker of that talent. Here, though, he takes what could so easily have been a dry procedural slog and injects it with crackling, urgent energy. There's a pace to this film, a momentum, that makes it feel much more alive than the courtroom drama label might suggest. He trusts the story, trusts his cast, and gets out of the way.
And what a cast to trust. I'll be honest, I haven't worked my way through a huge amount of Julia Roberts' filmography, but this performance left a mark. She plays Erin with a potent, unruly mix of charm, raw passion, and absolute stubbornness, and the crucial thing is that the script never lets her off the hook. This isn't a saint's story. We watch Erin bulldoze her way into a dismissive law firm through sheer bullheadedness, which is an absolute joy, but we also watch her neglect her kids, repeatedly lean on the good nature of her long-suffering boyfriend George, played with real grounded warmth, and generally leave a trail of strained relationships in her wake. That messiness is what makes her feel entirely human. Roberts took home the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role, and having now seen it, I completely understand why.
The film is also, and this caught me pleasantly off guard, genuinely funny. A huge part of that is down to the late, great Albert Finney as Ed Masry, the head of the law firm. His dynamic with Roberts is one of the film's biggest highlights. It's never romantic, never predictable. It's something more interesting than that: a kind of worn, frequently frustrated, deeply affectionate father-daughter relationship built on mutual respect and absolutely no patience for each other's worst habits. Every scene they share crackles.
What really impressed me, though, was the tension Soderbergh threads through the whole thing. I spent the entire runtime with my guard up, waiting for something to go catastrophically wrong, for the rug to be pulled out from under Erin and the people she's fighting for. That constant low hum of dread, the sense that everything could collapse at any moment, is expert filmmaking. And when the payoff finally arrives, it earns every bit of its triumphant feeling. I loved that finale. Properly loved it.
In terms of spirit, this shares a surprising amount of DNA with a film like I, Tonya. Both follow an outsider who has absolutely no business being in the room she's in, and yet manages to take the whole thing by storm on nothing but nerve and refusal to quit. There's something deeply satisfying about watching that kind of story told well, and Soderbergh tells it very well indeed.
Four and a half stars. A cracking film, and one I'd have missed entirely if I'd done any homework beforehand. Sometimes the poster lies, and thank goodness for that.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2000 | Watched: 2026-08-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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