Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Steven Soderbergh's new film Black Bag opens this weekend (all around Seattle, including the Majestic Bay, SIFF Uptown, Admiral, etc.), which had me thinking about Soderbergh's big year of 2000, when he had two successful movies in release, and won the Best Director Oscar for Traffic. Both pieces are from Film.com. And just in case it's been a while since you saw the movie, the reference to Julia Roberts' cleavage is no sexist aside but a direct callback to a plot point in the movie. Even more obscure is the reference to Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Gary Bauer, a right-wing nitwit who ran for president in 2000.
Erin Brockovich
Yes, the buzz is correct: Julia Roberts owns this sweet-natured film, a movie star in full control of her starlight. Also her cleavage. Erin Brockovich, based on a true story, exists primarily as a vehicle for Roberts, and it is successful on those terms. We might have expected a bit more, given that Roberts is teamed here with director Steven Soderbergh, whose Out of Sight and The Limey were among the high points of recent memory, but the results certainly make for a pleasing night at the movies.
The story sticks closely to formula. That’s what’s most surprising about the Soderbergh credit; you keep expecting some curve ball to come whistling down the middle of the film, but it never comes. Roberts plays Erin Brockovich, a cheerfully trashy single mom who takes an office job in a decidedly middle-rung law firm. It isn’t easy keeping her job; her low-cut blouses and tight skirts are not popular among the other ladies in the room. Her boss is played by Albert Finney, who manages to instill great humanity in his vaguely henpecked attorney (Finney always sounds like he’s strangling when he executes an American accent, which somehow fits his character here).
In the course of filing stuff, Erin gets curious about a particular claim, which leads her to investigate. The case turns out to be a toxic-waste disaster in a Southern California desert town; thanks to Brockovich’s legwork and jes’ plain folks approach, the inhabitants get considerably more out of the deal than they otherwise would have. There are virtually no bumps on the way to the story’s expected conclusion.
At times this movie seems to slide by without really registering. But Soderbergh gives the picture a texture all its own: there’s a lovely feel for the brown, baked landscapes of L.A. and environs, and the film progresses in a series of gentle dissolves, rather than the hard-charging manner of most inspirational films. And Erin Brockovich demonstrates how good Soderbergh is with actors: a solid performer like Marg Helgenberger is reborn as one of the town’s victims, a Donna Reed type who can’t quite believe what’s happening to her. Ditto Aaron Eckhart, the monster from In the Company of Men, who browses most agreeably through his role as Erin’s Harley-ridin’ neighbor, loving the uncommitted life but decent enough to babysit Erin’s kids while she pursues her case.
The biker and Erin have a relationship, of course, but it doesn’t last. In the end, perhaps that’s the most radical thing about Erin Brockovich, although you barely notice it while the film is on: This is a major Hollywood movie, starring the major Hollywood female star, in which a love connection is not the reason for being of the entire project. This film suggests that a woman might be a good and loving mother and still be engaged by an important calling outside the home, which is an idea worth repeating in the era of Dr. Laura and Gary Bauer.
Traffic
In a very short period of time—since monkeying around with a self-made fandango called Schizopolis—Steven Soderbergh has mounted a kind of stealth attack on Hollywood formula moviemaking. Out of Sight brought a suppleness to the traditional star vehicle, The Limey dizzily jumbled expectations in a revenge plot, Erin Brockovich expertly balanced the dictates of political film and inspirational comedy, and Traffic looks coldly but energetically at the drug war. Each film also manages the feat of being an obviously personal project of its director. And except perhaps for The Limey’s overtly indie status, each uses big Hollywood bucks (and movie stars) to subvert the usual order of things. That’s what makes it a stealth attack, of course.
Traffic is movie excitement from beginning to end. True to Soderbergh’s aim of shaking films out of their A-B-C arrangement, Traffic consists of different stories running side-by-side, all concerned with the war on drugs. First we meet a Mexican cop (Benicio Del Toro), mired with his partner (Jacob Vargas) in the widespread ooze of official corruption. On the other side of the border, things get sticky with a San Diego stool pigeon (Miguel Ferrer in great doomed second-rateness) prepared to testify against a big-time drug lord (Steven Bauer). The drug lord’s pregnant wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), heretofore unaware of the true source of her family’s cushy La Jolla lifestyle, turns into a jungle cat in a ferocious plan to reverse this setback. (Soderbergh’s casting is uncanny, here drawing out the panther glint of ruthlessness that flashes in Zeta-Jones’ dark eyes.)
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where they have everything under control, a complacent Ohio judge (Michael Douglas) prepares to take over as the nation’s new “drug czar.” The irony is that he has no idea his own teenage daughter (Erika Christensen) is inhaling crack at preppie parties in the suburbs. One of the greatest things that can be said about writer Stephen Gaghan and Soderbergh’s design for the picture is that the character you’re watching at any given moment seems like the absolute center of the film, whether it’s a nominal star like Michael Douglas (a seamless performance, reeking of self-satisfaction but eventually snarling to his wife—Amy Irving—that he needs his Scotch before dinner “to keep from dying of boredom”) or DEA agents Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle, slippery lawyer Dennis Quaid, dangerously smart teen Topher Grace, and lofty Mexican general Tomas Milian—the latter a sublime turn for an old pro.
The only real knock I can think of against the film is the vague sense that we’ve seen the subject matter already; the entertainment industry is so obsessed with crime, the freshness of the material feels like it’s been NYPD Blued, Homicided, and Law and Ordered out of existence. What’s new is the overall acknowledgment of failure. Absolutely nothing in the system works, Traffic says, and everybody knows it.
Soderbergh, who operated the mostly handheld camera himself, serves up this American saga with bracing speed, but without losing psychological density. The jittery approach has less to do with realism than with immediacy; Soderbergh’s willingness to exaggerate the colors of the film’s different precincts (icy blue for Douglas’s life, humid yellow for Del Toro’s ethical journey) serves no notion of realism except the artistically appropriate kind. The best kind.
March 14, 2025
