Most Haunted

The Art of the Loud Suit

There’s a moment in *Erin Brockovich* where you realize the movie isn’t actually about a legal case. It’s about being the only person in the room that everyone else secretly wishes would shut up. When Erin first appears, she’s loud in every sense: her wardrobe is tight, her hair is big, her speech is peppered with profanity, and her presence clashes with the beige, muted professionalism of a mid-90s law office. Steven Soderbergh, at a stage in his career where he bounced between experimental projects and mainstream fare, doesn’t treat her like a plucky underdog. He treats her like kinetic energy trapped in a world that prizes stillness.



Most legal dramas linger in sterile courtrooms or mahogany-lined law offices, fixating on the grandeur of the law itself. Soderbergh and screenwriter Susannah Grant do something different: they keep the camera on the friction. The movie isn’t trying to explain tort law; it tracks how quickly a woman in a low-cut top and a loud voice gets written off by men in suits. Watching Julia Roberts hold that space is fascinating because she weaponizes her own celebrity baggage. She was, at the time, the biggest movie star in the world, and she leans into the “America’s Sweetheart” persona only to tear it apart. She walks with a purposeful stomp, shoulders back, chewing gum as though she’s trying to swallow a grudge whole. It’s a performance of pure physicality—she’s not acting like a lawyer, she’s acting like a person who refuses to fade into the background.

The film’s quietest triumph is the relationship between Erin and Ed Masry, played by Albert Finney. If Roberts is lightning, Finney is the rod. He’s tired, skeptical, and visibly burned out by the profession he’s devoted his life to. Their rapport isn’t romantic; it’s a grudging alliance between two people who, despite themselves, begin to care about what’s happening in Hinkley. Finney’s work is all in the slump of his shoulders and the sigh he releases before he speaks. He balances Erin’s manic energy, proving you need both the hammer and the anvil to make something real.



Look at the scene in the Jensen family’s living room. It’s the film’s pivot. Erin isn’t in a blazer; she’s wearing something bright, almost unmoored in that dusty, sick house. But she stops talking. She sits on the floor. She stops being the “too much” person and becomes the woman who finally, painfully listens. It’s the moment we see she has a superpower: she doesn’t try to argue. She just refuses to look away. Roger Ebert, in his original review, wrote that “she is a woman without a past, without a formal education, without a reputation, but she is a woman with a strong sense of right and wrong.” He was right, but I’d add that she sees her so-called “lack of professionalism” as her strength. People underestimate her, and that’s when she gets to the truth.

The film does stumble a bit—its second act drags under procedural detail at times, and the ending feels a touch too tidy, too Hollywood-perfect in its moral resolution. Real life seldom offers such clean punctuation. But the movie works because it treats the environment—the water, the illness, the dust—as a living character, not just a backdrop. The shots of the Hinkley landscape look gorgeous in a desolate, hazy California way, but there’s always this persistent sense that something rotten is bubbling just beneath the surface.



There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a massive corporation crumble at the hands of someone who doesn’t even know the right term for a deposition. It taps into that primal urge to see the power imbalance corrected by someone who has nothing to lose. I’m not sure the film would hit the same way if it were made today—there’s more cynicism now—but in 2000 there was still a sliver of optimism that one person could walk into a boardroom, refuse to sit down, and simply outlast the people in charge. It’s a comforting notion, even knowing the real world seldom leaves things that easy to clean up.