Made In Dagenham (**1/2)

MADE IN DAGENHAM
Directed by Nigel Cole

**1/2

There are certain film actors that are imbued with such wonderful likability that they fill their screen characters with such unavoidable watchability. I think Sally Hawkins is the newest member of this group and in Made in Dagenham she continues this trend. As the Women's Rights activist Rita O'Grady (not a real person in history, but real enough for the movie I suppose), Hawkins charms the audience so much that it is almost enough to distract from the film's by-the-numbers screenplay and mundane, often scattered direction. She's able to make the movie a pretty fun experience when all is said and done, and even though we've seen a hundred movies just like this one before, at least we can appreciate the wit.

Rita is one of 187 women working for the famed Ford Company factory in Dagenham, England. They may not put the actual car together, but they sew and hem the fabrics and the leathers for the seats and the armrests. Doesn't seem like the greatest responsibility until you sit in a car seat that's busting at the seams, and you realize just how uncomfortable an improperly manufactured car seat can be. What these women do is skilled, complex labor, but yet, the Ford company does not feel like paying them as if it is. It doesn't help that the head of their union is more interested in indulging in free meals and round trips through Europe, than actually furthering their cause. But when the Ford Company treats them as merely a burdening issue that will soon go away with a little patience, Rita and her group of strong-minded, sharp-tongued girls leave the plant and go on strike.

Albert (Bob Hoskins), the girls' factory manager, brings up one point to Rita that they'd never considered. They will never get paid fairly because no matter what happens, women will always be paid less than their male counterparts. Why? Because the companies can do so, they will do so, and that is how it has always been. So, Rita, along with her witty group of girls decide they will not come back to work until equal pay amongst men and women becomes legislation. This alienates the men, who get laid off once the car plant cannot produce seat furnishing. This includes Rita's oafish, but lovable husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) - whose character has one of the single most hackneyed character arcs in movie history: love wife, made nervous by said wife, dismiss wife, challenge wife, break and come begging back for mercy; we know as soon as we see him.

It's not long before their equal pay strike and hits the news, and even captures the attention of Secretary of State Barbara Castle (a fiery performance from Miranda Richardson). Feeling a kinship to these women, Castle legitimizes their cause and stands behind it - but even she has political hurdles she must cross before making equal pay a reality. Made In Dagenham is the kind of movie where you do not even fathom there being a solemn note by the end, and seeing Barbara Castle's appearance only strengthens that. It's the kind of film that strategically moves all of its heartbreak to the middle - men berating them, trouble at home and in society for shutting down the plant - so that the ending is even that much more uplifting. Which is fine in the overall scheme of things, but it certainly leaves the movie without any real feeling of suspense, and when the screenplay itself decides to tell the story without any real edge or innovation, you walk in knowing what you're going to see once the opening credits come up.

But there is one major subplot that has real heart. It includes Lisa Hopkins (Rosamund Pike), the wife of one of the Ford agents trying to break the women's strike. When Lisa and Rita strike up a kinship, it seems a bit like an odd pairing, but Lisa presents a personal, realistic window into the world that these women are fighting against everyday. "I've got an Honors degree from Cambridge University," she tells Rita, "but my husband speaks to me like I'm a fool." In only a handful of scenes, Rosamund Pike's performance is gentle, but powerful, allowing a seemingly superfluous character make an indelible stamp on the film. So much so that I almost wondered what a film solely about Lisa would have been like, but I guess that's besides the point.

The film does have terrific performances. The factory women (including great work from Andrea Riseborough, Jaime Winstone, and Geraldine James, amongst others) are a hoot, not subscribing to the usual ladylike behavior that's expected from their fellow Englishwomen. They make snarky remarks, cuss, and have sex, and this group of actresses fills them with enough unapologetic charm that it doesn't seem like a put-on. And Hawkins (who I've loved since her masterful work in Happy-Go-Lucky) does do a good job in a kind of role she'd never tackled before. Does director Nigel Cole fully exploit her greatest qualities? Not all the time. I sometimes felt towards the end that Rita spent so much time crying that it made it hard for me to believe she could accomplish anything. But Hawkins is able to dig deep and bring soul out of a very sweet, overtly emotional woman.

I can't imagine anybody walking out of Made In Dagenham disappointed. It opened with a giant thud in America, which left its Oscar chances fleeting, at best. It's satisfying in the kind of way that fast food is, but certainly you could eat something a lot better - and surely Made In Dagenham could have had a lot more spark. As it stands, all of its excitement stems solely from its cast, which wasn't afraid to be bare of ethics and embrace crassness. I feel like there were a lot of wasted opportunities here. Perhaps too much time was spent trying to shoehorn the film into a lighthearted comedy. Either way, Dagenham is worth seeing for the performances from Hawkins, Pike, and James alone. And Miranda Richardson does score occasionally when she is on the screen. It's also a bummer to find out that Rita O'Grady never actually existed, but who knows, perhaps the real story could have been even duller.

The Mike Leigh Ticker

There are few filmmakers as consistently good and consistently interesting as Mike Leigh. His films explore the nature of human dynamics by getting rid of the burdens of an overbearing plot, instead just letting the characters dictate the forward motion of the story. He's notorious for a process that involves precious little actual screenwriting and lots of rehearsing with actors and allowing the script to create itself. His latest film, Another Year, has been getting tremendous reviews since its premiere at Cannes earlier in the year, while getting particularly positive notes for actress Lesley Manville, a Mike Leigh veteran. The trailer has come out recently. Here it is:








It seems to capture the spirit of most Mike Leigh films and, also like most Mike Leigh films, seems to have a collection of excellent performances. There's a certain stripped-down quality to Leigh's films that will probably agitate American audiences, but fascinates me. He completely betrays the standard three-act character arcs that make up most Hollywood films. He instead allows the actors to live inside his characters, and in that way, they become real people. Not that this process will always produce the most interesting films, but it's a testament to the genius of Mike Leigh that all of his films are interesting. In his three best films (Naked, Secrets & Lies, and Happy-Go-Lucky), Leigh has three totally different stories about three completely different sets of people. What ties them all together is the incredible depth of the people being followed on the screen. Let's take a look at the three films to see how Leigh employs different techniques to bring the best out of his actors to create some of the most fully-fleshed-out character development in cinematic history.

Naked (1993)

In what may be his masterpiece, Mike Leigh gives the movie audience one of its greatest challenges. Naked opens with its lead character, Johnny (David Thewlis), raping a young woman in a disgusting alley. For the rest of the film, we have to follow Johnny and eventually - if we're going to sit through this movie at all - empathize with him. And more or less, Leigh is able to pull it off. The film continues as Johnny walks drearily through industrial England, meeting various people, some of whom he has relations with and others he is meeting for the first time. By allowing Johnny to hob-nob amongst so many of the middle class, we begin to see Johnny as more than a monster and more a human being. Not that Johnny ever gives us a reason to actually like him. He spends the entirety of the film abusing people with his words, and occasionally with his hands.

So why does Mike Leigh dedicate an entire film to this elitist rascal? Because over the course of the encounters that Johnny faces, we see that all of his outward aggression is based on an inner turmoil. No matter how much emotional and physical pain he may extract on those around him, it never compares the amount of anguish that he expels upon himself. For all his pontificating snobbery, Johnny cannot find away to enjoy himself. Leigh doesn't show this by giving Johnny some drawn-out, contrived speech at the end of the film about his inner torment. Instead, this realization comes to the audience gradually over two hours of him stumbling from place to place, yelling at some people and being kinder to others. Leigh shows us every dimension of his personality, and by the end we feel like we didn't even remember him raping someone in the opening shot. How many films can say they can successfully made a rapist watchable for 131 minutes?

Secrets & Lies (1996)

This is, if you look up all those meaningless statistics, probably Mike Leigh's most popular film. Getting him Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture, Secrets & Lies gained Leigh the biggest audience he ever had - and probably will ever have. Unlike Naked, Secrets follows a group of people. Particularly, the Purley family, an English middle class family that includes a portrait photographer named Maurice (Timothy Spall) who acts as the erratic family's patriarch, and the neurotic Cynthia Rose (Best Actress nominee Brenda Belthyn) whose constant emotional breakdowns and lack of propriety agitate everyone else in the family. Things become even more jumbled when Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an adopted African Englishwoman, goes searching for the mother who gave her up, which in turn, ends up being Cynthia Rose. Despite the oddity of this discovery, Cynthia and Hortense begin a rich friendship, and Cynthia even introduces her to the family, though she keeps her true identity a secret.

As the title suggests, this family has a lot of buried secrets and Cynthia's masking of Hortense becomes just another on top of the pile, leading to an explosion of realizations when everyone in the family meets together for a party. The film pretty quickly glosses over the lunacy of a woman as white as Cynthia being the mother of someone as black as Hortense. This is probably for the best, since the relationship that ends up developing between Cynthia and Hortense is not much like a mother and daughter. It is this non-family dynamic that really disrupts the Purley family in ways that ruptures toward almost everyone involved. The story behind Secrets & Lies is notorious, with no script existing and most actors not knowing the nature of the family "secrets" until they are revealed to the characters in front of the camera. While this seems like a hacky way to bring out a realistic performance, Leigh really succeeds here, composing probably the best ensemble directing in all his films.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Mike Leigh's last film is probably one of his best and holds a lot of resemblance to Naked in how it follows one character through a series of seemingly mundane events. The main difference? While Johnny from Naked pines in his own self-loathing, the main character in Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), is awash in self-confidence and happiness. Poppy is constantly going head-to-head with the cantankerous and combative people of middle class England (once again). At first, we don't really blame people for being turned off by Poppy, since her never-ending sunshine comes off slightly obnoxious and extremely annoying. When Poppy goes into a bookstore and meets with a grumpy bookseller at the open of the film, her need to bring a smile to his face seems almost antagonizing. Like Johnny, Leigh presents his main character in a highly unfavorable light, and now he will make us spend an entire film with them.

With Happy-Go-Lucky, though, Leigh actually does provide us with a scene that helps our opinion turn on her, and it comes fifty-five minutes into the film. As Poppy walks home at night, she hears a homeless man singing nonsense to himself in the middle of an abandoned warehouse skeleton. Poppy approaches him and it quickly becomes obvious that the homeless man is delusional and slightly crazy, but she stays with him, matching his nonsense words with meaningless answers. She gives this lonely man someone to talk to, even though he'd seem dangerous to most. She actually listens to him, even though he has nothing comprehensive to say, and she brings light to his dreary existence. Though there are many fantastic scenes in Happy-Go-Lucky, this is easily the best because it shows how strongly she wants to reflect her unbeatable happiness upon others. Many will criticize the character of Poppy and Hawkins' performance by saying that Poppy's attitude isn't any kind of realistic. Leigh does not give in to that criticism, trusting his actors and believing in the potential of his characters.

I was pretty upset when Hawkins' excellent performance wasn't given an Oscar nomination in 2009 (yet, Angelina Jolie was able to get one for Changeling. Cruel World), but Leigh did get a nomination for his screenplay, and while many will certainly downgrade how much he actually writes the screenplays for his films, I found it highly deserved. Like his other great films (Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, All or Nothing), Leigh forms the screenplay around his characters, and in this way they are able to actually be alive. This is why Leigh is probably the most unsung master filmmaker in America. I assume they appreciate him in England, though I don't know for sure. I certainly hope so...