By Matt Soergel
Florida Times-Union

It's all Julia Roberts, all the time, in Erin Brockovich, and she doesn't waste a moment of it.

Like her or not, she has that rare movie-star quality: She rules the camera, commands attention - and the low-cut, clingy and gravity-defying outfits she wears here don't hurt her a bit in that respect.

Of course, we're always aware we're watching Julia Roberts. At her best, as she is here, she's always Julia Roberts, with those impossible legs, impossible hair, impossible smile. She can't hide in her roles - she tried, in the dour Mary Reilly, and if you're one of the two dozen or so who saw it, you know what a disaster that was.

Erin Brockovich lets her be Julia Roberts. And her fans will be in heaven.

It's based on a true story of a single mom and law-office flunky who investigates a mighty utility company that's polluting a desert town where just about everybody is sick.

Roberts is the sassy Brockovich, who has three kids and no job prospects, though she does have a flashy wardrobe and a tendency toward highly inappropriate speech (her profanity-filled conversation is the reason the movie gets its R rating).

She talks her way into the law office of a rumpled attorney named Ed Masry (Albert Finney). The interplay between Roberts and Finney is one of the best things going in this movie (more interesting than the romance she has with a nice-guy motorcyclist wellplayed by Aaron Eckhart).

Finney's Masry is exasperated by and fond of his extravagantly dressed employee, and the two of them continually get on each other's nerves while bonding - they've got kind of a Mary Richards-Lou Grant thing going.

Then Brockovich gets handed the files on an unimportant pro bono case - and starts digging, uncovering a massive conspiracy.

The film has a little trouble here: We get a good sense of her desperation to get and keep a job (cockroaches hide under dishes in her sink; she has to leave her kids with a baby sitter with scarily dead eyes).

But we never really get a feel for why her character is so dogged in her mission, logging hundreds of miles driving, dodging guards at the utility plant, patiently interviewing hundreds of townspeople, sifting through thousands of documents.

Give Erin Brockovich some credit, though. Although some of its legal points seem sketchy, it does immerse us in the grunt work necessary to take on such a case. At times it even threatens to bog down in the tedious process.

But Roberts is always there to spark things up.

It's fun to see her render a young male clerk helpless, just by leaning over a desk, and it's a hoot to see her go up against high-powered lawyers - flummoxing the rich and powerful just as she did in Pretty Woman. But some of her best moments come around her character's kids, as she ad-libs, I presume, to the amusing, spontaneous comments of the barely verbal baby in her arms.

As a story, Erin Brockovich is nothing out of the ordinary. But it's made more interesting by the offbeat style of director Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, The Limey and sex, lies and videotape). It's a project more commercial than most for him, but he still brings his understated approach to it.

Backed by a cool, jazzy score, the movie is unhurried and slightly off-kilter; Soderbergh steps around typical big Hollywood scenes and ambles up sideways to his big jokes. Unlike many filmmakers, he's willing to let silences speak, willing to cut away from a scene before he's wrung every single bit of pathos from it.

He's taken the feel of an independent film and applied it satisfyingly to a mainstream movie - and one of the ultimate mainstream stars.