REVIEW: Sally Hawkins Strikes in Semi-Rousing Made in Dagenham

A substantial slice of socio-history cut with plain yogurt and a glob of treacle, then pulse-puréed to a smooth, hyper-digestible consistency, Made in Dagenham tastes how I imagine a feminist placebo might. The true story (an account of British woman machinists who strike for equal pay in 1968) and the star (the ineffable Sally Hawkins) are bound up in director Nigel Cole's recipe for a film that's passable in every available way.

Hawkins plays Rita O'Grady, conceivably an earlier iteration of her similarly slurry-accented, working-class heroine in Happy Go Lucky. Married with two children, Rita makes seat covers in Dagenham's Ford plant by day, delivers her son from his be-robed, high-handed prat of a teacher in the afternoons, and at night keeps house at the low-income housing estate where she and her family live. When Rita and her colleagues are informed that their work -- performed in a sweatshop hangar -- has been reclassified from skilled to unskilled labor, the women make a collective end run around their default passivity to get in touch with a motivating dose of outrage. What use is a union if you can't throw the weight around?

Rita is prepped for her awakening by an encounter with the teacher who is strapping her son's palm to a pulp. By virtue of his station that teacher will always be right, and he freely uses his prerogative to put Rita in her place. Cole and screenwriter William Ivory have a woeful reliance on these blunt confrontations, in which one party lowers the boom and the other cowers in silence. As shorthand for the entrenched class and gender barriers Rita is up against, they feel pretty cheap; when the tables turn and they become shorthand for her empowerment, the cheapness, alas, remains.

Still burning over her humiliation with the teacher, Rita loses patience when a meeting with union representatives devolves into a discussion of pacifying optics and empty promises. For Rita, losing patience means holding her peace until a "Bollocks!" hisses out. She follows the expletive with a measured explanation of her union's demands: Skilled vs. unskilled is really a matter of keeping the female workers underpaid, something they are no longer willing to be. The tides are changing, and Ford can no longer rely on its women not to strike, a resistance that maintains the status quo of female income as supplementary, at best. The men exchange gobsmacked looks -- simply hearing a female voice in a boardroom seems to jam their circuits -- and the scene is called.

Though it's rote, sitcom-level stuff, it works well enough the first time. But Cole can't resist returning to the well, so that by the time Miranda Richardson, as Secretary of State Barbara Castle, finally drops the hammer on her foppish, undermining undersecretaries -- Look here boys, I'm a lady and I'll do what I like! -- the moment can't carry the weight it should. It's a shame, because healthy indignation is not only justified but required to bring this story to life. Too often the story feels like it's being mined for recycled beats.

But then taking the feel-good dramedy route (as opposed to, say, the clenched realism of North Country, Charlize Theron's females-at-the-factory, class-action rouser) has its challenges, chief among them setting up a light, flexible rhythm as opposed to a gong show. In Hawkins, Cole has an actress of vivid presence and versatility, but her sui generis style is forced into an appealing but ultimately constrictive mold: Demure, driven, and right. As the film goes on, Rita can't get a sentence out without welling into tears, whether she's shoring up in the face of great pressure (eventually, her union's strike brings the whole plant to a shut-down), speechifying at meetings or facing off with her husband (Daniel Mays) about their responsibilities to each other. Bob Hoskins is sweet but a little too silly as a union aide-de-camp who coaches Rita in private, then licks his chops and pops his eyes when she sticks her landing during negotiations. Rosamund Pike has a better time with Lisa, a palomino thoroughbred who forges a mini-union with Rita to oust that slap-happy teacher. Here too, however, Cole won't be satisfied until her charm and poise is reduced to yet another slow-clap confrontation with her husband, who happens to be a Ford executive.

Cole's shopworn comic instincts also mark attempts to capture the instigating mood of the moment; he offers young women shagging without prejudice and proudly wagging their bums in hot pants as leading indicators that the women's movement had finally reached the UK. There is a case to be made for the lag, in fact: It seems more than coincidence that Ford plants in Britain in the late 1960's were exploiting female workers in ways they no longer could in the United States, where the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963.

Ford's designated baddie is played, sans beard and avec showstopping weave, by Richard Schiff, a union buster whose trump card is threatening to take Ford's business elsewhere -- somewhere, it need not be said, where labor laws are a little more...forgiving. The change was a-coming, at any rate, and happily Rita O'Grady stepped into its path; perhaps a film hand-stitched with the care she and her co-workers put into their piecework was more than a girl could hope for.