Movie Review: Made In Dagenham (2010)

A labour conflict drama, Made In Dagenham celebrates a small group of women who fought for gender pay equity. The film is well-intentioned but altogether too obvious.

It's 1968 in unfashionable Dagenham, England, where the Ford motor company employs tens of thousands of workers at a car manufacturing plant. Less than 200 of them are women, and they mostly operate sewing machines to stitch together seat fabrics. Encouraged by supervisor Albert (Bob Hoskins), the women organize labour action to demand better pay and recognition as skilled workers.

Feisty machinist Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins) supplants the more frazzled Connie (Geraldine James) as leader and spokesperson, and shocks Ford's management by demanding equal pay for equal work regardless of gender. The women go on a full strike, eventually shutting down the factory. As the community starts to struggle financially, Rita learns not everyone appreciates her hardline stance. Ford's Detroit leadership wades into the conflict, as does Britain's Employment Secretary Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson).

Based on a true story but featuring mostly made-up characters, Made In Dagenham is as British as its title, drawing inspiration from suburban working class housing estates and the spirit of unlikely activists standing up for an idealistic principle against a profit-driven heartless corporation. The story carries inherent power, but writer William Ivory and director Nigel Cole cannot do much with it except mechanically tick the expected boxes.

As it goes through the motions, the film is comfortably and annoyingly familiar. Rita is the local hero emerging as an inspirational leader; her family life suffers as she is preoccupied with the cause; the community turns against her when the men are forced out of work; and she has to persist and fight for what is right, staring down not just the company but also the broader male-dominated union movement, unimpressed with women making their voices heard.

When it's not reverberating with strong echoes of Norma Rae, Made In Dagenham not infrequently threatens to descend to television movie-of-the-week fare, complete with a trite call to ignite the British spirit of World War Two. Other than the empathetic Albert, the men are uniformly portrayed as dolts, and all the Ford management types may as well be labeled "evil corporate type" on their foreheads.

Cole introduces the character of Lisa Hopkins (Rosamund Pike) as the wife of a Ford executive. She crosses paths with Rita at the school attended by both their kids, and what promises to be an interesting across-the-divide relationship between the women becomes a missed opportunity, settled in the most bland way possible.

Ivory's script leaves out notions of depth and background, most of the characters quick-fried into cliches. Sally Hawkins single-handedly drags the film towards respectability as she fights gamely against the material, but she barely bridges the credibility gap in Rita's evolution from sewing machinist to articulate, passionate and fearless leader.

Some highlight moments are provided by Miranda Richardson as a Labour Party cabinet minister caught between crass political realities, genuine economic imperatives and sympathy to the cause of her fellow women. Made In Dagenham starts on the shop floor but ends at the policy table, where a better story may have resided all along.

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Movie Review: Chicken Run (2000)

A stop-motion animated comedy thriller, Chicken Run delivers warm laughs and self-effacing action.

In rural England, Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha) is a smarter-than-most hen always hatching plans for a group escape from the chicken farm of the ruthless Melisha Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) and her hapless husband Willard (Tony Haygarth), where chickens are summarily killed as soon as they stop laying eggs. All of Ginger's escape plots fail and she spends plenty of time in solitary confinement dumped into a bin.

The other chickens on the farm include the dim-witted and constantly knitting Babs (Jane Horrocks), the elderly Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), who cannot stop talking about his days in military service, and champion egg-layer Bunty (Imelda Staunton). Nick and Fetcher (Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels) are two scavenger rats who steal supplies to support Ginger's escape plans.

The fate of the chickens appears sealed when the Tweedys decide to convert their egg farm into a mass production chicken pie factory. But one day the cocky and laid-back American chicken Rocky Rhodes (Mel Gibson), a circus act escapee, lands at the farm, giving Ginger hope that he can teach all the chickens to fly in preparation for a mass escape.

Directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, the duo behind Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run is 80 minutes in the life of enterprising chickens on the farm, drawing inspiration from The Great Escape to deliver cheeky humour and unlikely thrills. With a good balance of smart, stodgy, charming, doltish and evil characters, the film carries plenty of appeal for younger audiences, peppered with enough wit to satisfy adults.

The film offers simplified lessons in leadership, honesty, teamwork and perseverance, with side-orders of friendship, loyalty and rising to the challenge. Even a pecking romance eventually blossoms amidst the desperate attempts to find an escape plan that actually works.

The stop-animation artwork is conceived with painstaking care, the seamless camerawork creating a fluid and enjoyable cinematic experience. The chickens are provided with hands, teeth and sympathetic eyes to make them accessible. Most of the action takes place within the chicken coops, with one memorable excursion into the fiendishly productive pie-making machine.

The voice acting is full-bodied, Julia Sawalha a stand-out in providing Ginger with an iron will to escape and a yearning to experience freedom outside the farm fence. Jane Horrocks contributes plenty of laughs as the clueless Babs, and Benjamin Whitrow nails the insufferable old fart Fowler. Mel Gibson is less engaged as Rocky.

Full of madcap energy, Chicken Run is an unwavering commitment to fly the coop.

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Movie Review: The Hours (2002)

A dense multi-era drama inspired by the life and works of Virginia Woolf, The Hours is a slow moving three character study revolving around depression and death.

After opening with Woolf (Nicole Kidman) committing suicide by drowning, the film alternates between three separate stories. In the early 1920s, Woolf is miserable living in the British countryside, struggling with writer's block and depression as she tries to write the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane) bears the brunt of her anti-social behaviour, while a visit from her sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) makes matters worse.

In Los Angeles of the early 1950s, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a depressed housewife reading Mrs. Dalloway. Laura is pregnant with her second child, stuck in bland suburban hell, and no longer in love with husband Dan (John C. Reilly). Laura has a sensitive and precocious five year old son (Jack Rovello), and a glamorous neighbour Kitty (Toni Collette) who is facing her own hell.

And in New York City of 2001, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) is busy organizing a celebration and party for her lifelong friend and former lover Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a renowned author and poet suffering miserably with the late stages of AIDS. When they were lovers, Richard bestowed the title Mrs. Dalloway on Clarissa. Now Richard is deeply depressed, and forces Clarissa to question her approach to life. Clarissa's partner Sally (Allison Janney) and daughter Julia (Claire Danes) watch as Clarissa's big day disintegrates, and the appearance of Richard's former lover Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels) does not help.

Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Hours wallows in a misery of its own creation. While the three lead performances are perfect, with Kidman nabbing the Best Actress Academy Award, the film is a lengthy, unrelenting treatise on lives stalled at the dead end of severe depression. The Hours starts in a dark place and walks, slowly, into pitch blackness.

All three stories unfold over the course of one day, and Daldry cleverly weaves the emotional strings linking the three women, from the depression and death themes to visual parallels and dialogue, with Mrs. Dalloway serving as the common foundation. A vague strand of unexplored lesbian lust also oscillates across the three stories. A more physical connection ultimately emerges between Laura and Clarissa, and overall the film does just enough to maintain interest through the thick fog of despair.

Through the dense thicket of tangled negative emotions, relief comes only in the enjoyment derived from Kidman, Moore and Streep, actresses at the top of the craft bringing to life three women struggling against greater forces. Kidman sacrifices her looks with a harsh nose to simulate the common image of Woolf. Her subdued performance is filled with internal struggle and external iciness, a woman content to let her misery drip out and contaminate those closest to her.

Moore gets to reveal the least about Laura Brown, a character with hardly any other adults around her to talk to. Brown's day is centred on one major decision, a choice between seeking immediate relief or longer term opportunity. Her son appears to know more about his mother's mental state than most boys his age. Streep's Clarissa is trying to be positive, and she does her best to fend off Richard's choking negativity and carry on. But when misery comes knocking it can be relentless, and Clarissa's big day will see black clouds move across her sun.

Ultimately The Hours only finds resolution in various forms of emotional escape rather than difficult confrontation, all three women ending the day staring at future prospects that are at least as gloomy as they appeared in the morning. There are only glimmers of light, and the passing hours serve more to confirm the gathering storm of dejection.

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Movie Review: Empire Of The Sun (1987)

The adventures of an abandoned young English boy under Japanese occupation in China, Empire Of The Sun is an earnest coming of age drama looking for a purpose. There is no doubting the visual beauty of the film, but a narrative emptiness lingers.

In Shanghai's International Settlement, young Jamie Graham (Christian Bale) lives a pampered life with his parents John and Mary, despite the gathering threat of World War Two landing in the city. Jamie is obsessed with fighter planes, and cannot help but admire Japan's military might. In the chaos that erupts when the Japanese finally make their move and forcibly seize Shanghai, Jamie is separated from his parents. He initially survives on his own before meeting Basie (John Malkovich), an American ship steward detached from his crew and scrounging out a living.

Both Basie and Jamie are eventually captured and transported to a prison camp near a military air field. Jamie meets fellow prisoners Doctor Rawlins (Nigel Havers) and Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson), who slip into an uneasy role as surrogate parents. Jamie settles down to a decent life at the camp, earning the respect of American PoWs and admiring the Japanese pilots from afar, waiting for the war to end.

An adaptation of J.G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel directed by Steven Spielberg, Empire Of The Sun looks great as it waits for things to happen, which they rarely do. The in-built pathos of a young boy having to grow up in a hurry in order to survive in the midst of global turmoil runs out relatively early. There is a modicum of sustained interest in Jamie's almost unabashed enthusiasm for celebrating the enemy Japanese pilots and their planes, but in the absence of any overarching character quest, the film plateaus into a what's-next-for-Jamie exercise, the war defining the prisoner experience, the character going along for the survival ride. The narrative is ultimately a doughnut, the outside, greater events more interesting than the hole in the middle.

Which is not to belittle Christian Bale's achievement. At around 13 years old, he delivers an affecting performance, fully able to hold the movie together, making up for the character's lack initiative with powerful observational acting. As Jamie's world becomes a kaleidoscope of surrealism, Bale captures the child thrust into a world suddenly fragmented into a new reality, gradually assuming man-like behaviours as a world at war reveals itself to be most unwelcoming for children.

For a movie extending past 150 minutes, there are precious few other characters to care about. John Malkovich's Basie starts as an enigma and remains so, a gruff but smart man with hardly a backstory, presenting Jamie with both a challenge and a shield. Nigel Havers and Miranda Richardson get little to do except look quite unhappy at their miserable plight as prisoners, and rarely offer Jamie much in the way of guidance. Ben Stiller has a small role as an American PoW.

Without too much in the form of characters or narrative tension, and appropriately enough for a film project that started life as a David Lean project, Spielberg is left to focus on making Empire Of The Sun look stunning, and here he exceeds all expectations. Through the lens of cinematographer and frequent Spielberg collaborator Allen Daviau, the movie is a series of intricately constructed landscapes, whether in capturing nature's pure beauty or humanity struggling against the ravages of first poverty, then war, and finally unadulterated suffering and starvation. Making use of startling silhouettes, vivid colours, light and shadows, and excelling in the panic-in-the-streets heave of humanity in Shanghai, Spielberg conjures up a memorable visual feast.

Empire Of The Sun may not specifically move in any well defined direction, but as it meanders in search of a purpose, it manages to look absolutely fabulous.

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