 The Best Picture: This Year's Nominees |
|
|
 Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich |
|
If Frank Capra were alive today,
he'd be making films like this
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
A FEW YEARS before he died in 1991, I had the opportunity to ask director Frank Capra if he thought there any more people like Longfellow Deeds or Jefferson Smith left in America or if he'd used them all up in his pro-social comedies of the 1930s.
"Yes, there are," he told me. "I can think of one right now: Ralph Nader."
Well, that told me all I needed to know that I'm right about what I'm about to say: If Frank Capra were alive today, he might have beaten Steven Soderbergh to filming "Erin Brockovich."
Capra was a sucker for stories about regular guys who stood up for their ideals and fought the fat cats. He saw them as defenders of America's core principles and he dearly loved to see them come out on top. In the 1930s, when he was making pictures like "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," you still could get away with movies that assumed the innocent members of our society don't always get corrupted. A few years--and a world war--later, critics were calling those same pictures "Capra-corn" and even Capra had made a couple of much more cynical pictures like "Meet John Doe" and "State of the Union."
Perhaps a 21st century Capra wouldn't feel quite like portraying Ralph Nader as Mr. Clean anymore--especially after the last presidential election--but I'm fairly certain he'd be ready for the story of Erin Brockovich--a hot-tempered and hot-looking lady who took on plenty of fat cats in a campaign to bring a giant utility company to its knees for endangering the community with toxic wastes.
Could he have made a better picture than Soderbergh has? Probably not, but it might have been different in a lot of interesting ways--and I know I'd have bought a ticket.
"Erin Brockovich" by Soderbergh deftly underscores what a 21st century Capra hero would be like. For starters, neither Gary Cooper nor Jimmy Stewart would be up for the role because most of the populist heroes of today seem to be women. I'm guessing Capra would have called for Barbara Stanwyck, his favorite leading lady, to play Erin. She might have done a good job, too, since she was a former chorus girl from Brooklyn and could pop chewing gum with the best of them, although I seriously doubt she could have produced as many "oohs" and "ahhs" as Julia Roberts does every time she bends over to show us how low her sweaters are cut in "Erin Brockovich."
In fact, Erin is the character Roberts has been waiting for years to play--a sexy, volatile and even vulgar woman who can cuss like a longshoreman one minute and reason with you intelligently the next. Roberts grabs the essence of the real Erin and runs with it. She's a common American woman with a lot more smarts than anyone gives her credit for--and enough experience dealing with some of the rats in trousers a young woman meets in the so-called "man's world" of commerce to know how to hurt 'em back.
What the real Erin has is grit--and plenty of it. Roberts understands this and isn't afraid to use all the assets she has in her arsenal to make us pay attention to this woman and what she has to say. Though there are lots of talented people in "Erin Brockovich," it's Julia's picture--and her best shot so far to win her first Oscar as Best Actress.
If there's any picture in this year's batch of Oscar contenders that has the public on its side, it's probably "Erin Brockovich." Lots of critics have held it at arm's length just because it's so accessible and so outright entertaining. As Frank Capra might say, what's so darn bad about that? It makes you root for the right person, doesn't it? So what if the American common man of the 21st century is a woman? As long as she's common, that's what counts.
© 2001 by Ron Miller.
You can comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |