Made in Dagenham
Made in Dagenham
Directed by Nigel Cole
At the Angelika Film Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinema
Runtime: 113 min.
"Can we cope? is Sally Hawkins incredulous reply to a journalist reporting on her stressful leadership of striking auto workers. Were women. Now dont ask a stupid question.
That one momentone of the best in the British working-class drama Made in Dagenhamsays more about the world and the indomitable female spirit than all of For Colored Girls. Telling the story of a 1968 labor action by women employed at the huge Ford Motor Company plant in Dagenham, England, Made in Dagenham is essentially a story of female coping. (Ford hired 55,000 men but only 187 women to make 3,100 vehicles a day.) Hawkins, as Rita OGrady, puts up with her disbelieving husband and the strain of raising a family while making political progress and social history.
None of this means that Made in Dagenham is a great moviein fact, it lacks true excellence. But director Coles appreciation for how women cope and achieve goes in the right direction, more so than the pathetic sob stories by which Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey and Lee Daniels have stereotyped African- American female experience. Cole, who made the 2003 Calendar Girls, has a particular interest in the way women assert themselves. His attention to social history
and female resolveCalendar Girls saluted middle-aged, working-class women who dared to pose naked to publicize their independenceresults in a rare sense of femaleness. You dont have to be George Cukor or Sofia Coppola to achieve it. But you do need an orderly sense of drama, and Made in Dagenham messily compiles observation of Englands abundant working class with casual details of female boldness. These no-nonsense workers strip down to their brassieres to bear the factory heat; they talk back to men out of a naturalnot fashionablesense of human equality.
Hawkins, a plucky personality as Mike Leighs optimistic protagonist in the superb Happy-Go-Lucky, gets lost in Ritas reluctant labor heroine. Shes often too anxious and deferential than necessary. But Hawkins is also good at Ritas pluckiness, and in the latter part of the film she is winningly gallant and confident. Also better than all of For Colored Girls are scenes where Rita becomes infatuated with Lisa (Rosamund Pike), a Cambridge grad who has acquiesced to the norms of marriage and Ritas clash-then-empathy with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), the female factory executive.
Richards formal, theatrical virtuosity complements Hawkins working-class naturalism. The boardroom scene where Barbara remembers her individuality (I am whats known as a fiery redhead) is as rousing as Rita correcting her husbands condescending politeness, reminding him of his duty (Its rights, not privileges. Thats as it should be, Eddie!). Heres where these actresses redeem doctrinaire feminism. British filmmakers have a stronger, clearer sense of class entitlement and obligation (as in the excellent Brassed Off) than American filmmakers who get tangled up in fashionable, P.C. privilege as enjoyed by the middle-class, like in the obnoxious The Kids Are All Right and Charlize Therons phony North Country.
Ritas big speech is wonderfully egalitarian: Men and women, we are in this together. We are not divided by sex. Only by those willing to accept injustice. But Cole is slow to dramatize this realization; he pays more attention to the legacy of the story of striking female workers than to the reality of Englands class, gender and race structure. Documentary footage of the actual strike shows only white women workersa fact that must be computed by the audience to understand the social and cultural scope of the story. Other newsreel footage verifies blacks and Asian male factory workers. Some aspect of the black/Asian experience would have given fuller dimension to this inspiring story. Made in Dagenham proves that the struggle for human rights is not only for white or colored girls.