The thing that really carries this movie is the acting of Julia Roberts, who plays Erin Brockovich, the protagonist.

A single mother, with 3 kids, trying to make ends meet, Erin bears an unquenchable proclivity to speak her mind in the most blunt of methods on every occassion, even when the results end up hurting her significantly. It's hard not to empathize when someone has the guts to go into court and say, "That asshole smashed in my fucking neck." Speaking the honest truth, but of course, the judge was not impressed with that.

Costar Albert Finney plays Ed Masry, the lawyer who first takes Erin on as a client, and later becomes her employer. I thought he did a good job portraying the guy who initially tolerates Erin and her wild side, and later grows to like her as an employee, friend, and honorable human being. Good chemistry.

Now, about the "main plot", which revolves around Erin discovering some disturbing facts as to why the people who live across from the chemical factory keep getting mysteriously sick: When I saw where it was going, I was thinking, "Great. How many zillions of other movies have we seen which revolve around some hero discovering that the Big Bad Corporation is screwing the small townspeople rotten?"

What I didn't realize until viewing the special features, was that not only was the movie "based on a true story" (which can mean just about anything), but that the director went to great pains to to make it as realistic as possible, even to the point of cutting a scene which worked very well dramatically, but deviated a little too much from the actual events for him to feel comfortable about including it.

Could've fooled me. Then, learning that many of the extras in the town meeting were people who had been involved in the real case, and were reliving those moments. That the judge who held the pre-trial hearing was not an actor, but very same person who had made the ruling in the real life version years before.

And most chillingly, there really were people who got sick, contracted cancer, multiple miscarraiges, kids getting chronic nosebleeds, had their intestines rot out inside them. All because some corporation would rather cut corners, lie, and hide behind lawyers than spend the time and money to do things right. Even more frightning, the thought that these people may never have known the difference if someone hadn't bothered to investigate.

As the real Erin put it an interview on the special features, "If anybody ever had the audacity to walk into my home, and tell me -- knowing they had poisoned the water -- 'There's nothing wrong. It won't hurt your children.' Yet I've gone around for years thinking I'm crazy, why are my kids sick, why has God done this to me? And to think that all along they've known that, and to trick me and deceive me, and for me to walk away? Forget it. You can forget it."

The movie did have some continuity problems. When I watched the deleted scenes, I learned that this was was largely due to the fact that the original cut was 3 hours, 10 minutes long. Much was removed, including an entire sub-arc (which was also true to facts) involving Erin herself ending up in a hospital due to short-term exposure she suffered investigating the case.

So, to sum it up: Good movie, very good acting, and a story that is just real enough to be truly disturbing.