Erin Brockovich

Herald rating: ****

Cast: Julia Roberts, Albert Finney, Aaron Eckhart

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Running time: 130 mins

Rating: M

Review: Peter Calder

Julia Roberts' gamine and coltish beauty has always been her biggest handicap. In Pretty Woman we witnessed the birth of a star, but the actor in her has never been allowed to shine. Saddled with soft-in-the-head romantic comedies (Notting Hill) or just really bad movies (Dying Young) she has long looked wan and insipidly pretty, never even slightly interesting.

Now, at last, she gets a role in the proud tradition of Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck, the sassy, smart woman who knows what she's about - and she's never looked better.

The fact-based story is ominously familiar - big-hearted amateur beats big-city lawyers at their own game - but director Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape, Out Of Sight) stands it up for more than two hours and, if it drags a little at times, there isn't a predictable moment in it.

Roberts plays the title character, a one-time Miss Wichita, now a twice-divorced mother of three, who is innocently injured in a car accident. When her lawyer, Ed Masry (Finney), loses the injury suit, she wheedles and cajoles her way into a clerical job in his office, where she soon uncovers a scandal involving a power company which has polluted the water table with hexavalent chromium and riddled three generations of the local community with cancer.

It has all the elements of a simple-minded, manipulative and sentimental crowd-pleaser, but in the hands of Soderbergh - working from a razor-sharp script by Susannah Grant, who pens television's Party of Five - it becomes a genuinely interesting tale.

Much of the credit for that belongs to Roberts who creates a character of real texture - wrong-headed, self-doubting, occasionally spiteful and not above trading on her good looks. There's something deliciously self-effacing about the way she totters round in her high heels, the mile-long legs topped by microscopic miniskirts.

Roberts is daring us - as Brockovich is daring everyone around her - not to take her seriously just because she's gorgeous. When Masry asks her how she managed to get key information she replies without a trace of shame: "They're called boobs, Ed."

But it's more than just one-liners. In one scene, she's listening on a car phone as a third party describes her baby daughter's first words. Her face is a map of her ambivalence - the joy that it happened, the pain that she missed it, the knowledge that she had to be absent. It's a spellbinding moment and Roberts handles it superbly.

Sure, the ending is predictable; real life only makes it into the movies when the goodies win. What remains with us when the titles roll is the knowledge that, after all these years, Julia Roberts has finally proved she can act.