Made in Dagenham

We watched Made in Dagenham last night (thankfully, they didn't go all clever and call it Maid in Dagenham, which must have been a temptation, I'm sure.)   Even though it's based on a real-life event, a strike by the women workers at Ford's car factory in Dagenham, the story arc is as traditional as a thousand other movies that involve someone who doesn't think they've got much going for them deciding to stand up for their rights (Mr Deeds Goes to Washington, to name just one famous example).   So you know that once Sally Hawkins (playing Rita O'Grady - the real O'Grady appears in the film clips during the credits) gets her mettle up, it'll be click/click/click and all the nasty blokes holding the women back will go toppling like ninepins.  You know that there'll be a scene where her husband finally breaks down from being tolerant and gets mad, and then has to be told he has no reason to get mad, and that he's not a saint, and that a few scenes later he'll be apologising for being a twat and will be backing her to the hilt.  You know that one of the women will try to use the situation for her own ends, and will be brought back into the fold.  And you know that it'll all end happily ever after (this isn't Italian neo-realist moviemaking, after all).

If I sound cynical, it's only because there is a degree of predictability in the movie, and there were times when you wish the filmmakers had given the thing a bit more edge.   Seeing the real-life participants in those final clips, you wonder what they thought of what had been done to their story, which is treated fairly light-heartedly throughout (even given the situation, and a suicide late in the piece).   Having to strip down to your underwear in the factory because it was so hot in the summertime, or putting up umbrellas in the winter because of the leaking roof has a certain humour, but the reality would have been much less pleasant.  And that horrible moment (it happens two or three times) when there's a loud switching-on noise, and all the sewing machines suddenly come to life and expect the women to get on, like it or not, is something that's just accepted.  The feeling of being chained to those sewing-machines is never explored.  Perhaps there's a different movie - a neo-realist one - waiting to be made.  In the meantime, we have The Full Monty version (which also had a suicide, as I recall, but still managed to remain a comedy) and on its own merits this is an enjoyable movie.  After all, every one of us likes to see the underdog biting the heels of the bullies and overlords (including, here, Richard Schiff as Ford's American pit bull terrier - sans his usual beard, and with a wig covering his normal baldness).  The fact that those nasty overlords can be really vicious is only hinted at.  The winners here - we know it all along - are the 187 women who went on strike.  (The only time they don't win - at least initially - is in relation to a bullying school teacher played by Andrew Lincoln; he has one scene and leaves the otherwise garrulous Sally Hawkins speechless.)

Hawkins isn't my favourite actress.  There's no doubt she has bundles of talent, and uses her oddly-shaped face to considerable advantage.   However, when I twigged where I'd seen her before, as Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-go-Lucky, and remembered how we nearly went mad watching the manic performance she gave there, it was hard to see her objectively in this movie.  Some of Poppy's endless twitches, giggles and wriggles appear in this role too, though they're toned down considerably.  This is a problem when an actor appears in a role that you dislike; it can be hard to see them clearly in any other part.  Danny de Vito is a case in point, for me; I don't know what film it was that I first saw him in, but it put me off him almost completely - plus the fact that he does tend to play obnoxious little men.  And yet when he appeared briefly in an interview recently (he'd been voicing the Spanish version of The Lorax), he came across as a genuine, humble man, one who's been married happily to his wife of many years.  A complete opposite to the (often venal) characters he usually plays.   When I think about what I've just said, my comments are further undercut by the part Bob Hoskins plays in Made in Dagenham: he's another actor who's played some roles that have set my teeth on edge; here he's just wonderful.  Redeems himself!  LOL.

There's a wonderful moment towards the end of the movie, when Miranda Richardson, playing the inimitable Barbara Castle (no mean promoter of women's rights herself) comments to Hawkins about the dress she's wearing, which the latter admits she has to return from on loan when she gets back.   Richardson mentions the 'label' - it's been commented on a couple of times before in the movie - and Hawkins says about Richardson's dress: Isn't that a C&A? C&A is the equivalent of Marks and Spencer's: good, solid workaday clothing, but hardly fashionable.  Richardson says it is: she gets all her clothes from there.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to DC shoes.  The only connection here is that they're an item of clothing.  I wondered when I first saw the name whether they were shoes that you wore if you were travelling to Washington DC, or were the kind of thing politicians would favour when trotting through the Capitol Building.  In fact the DC stands for Droors Clothing, a label that's no longer in existence, I'm told.

As you can see from the picture, you'd have to be a fairly unconventional US politician to wear these around the Senate, though they might be comfortable enough.

Charlie Wilson's War

Began to watch Tropic Thunder last night but gave up fairly quickly. Apart from being schoolboy gross and full of foul language, it just wasn’t engaging – at least for us. Fortunately I’d got it out as my introductory ‘free’ New Release from Video Ezy after finding that the Civic Video had finally closed. Not surprising; it’s looked very unwell for some time.
I’d bought a couple of other DVDs, as it happened, one of which was Charlie Wilson’s War, which turned out to be a trifle odd also, but nowhere near as odd as its predecessor. For one thing, it may have been that Tom Hanks was playing a loose-living middle-aged Congressman with a penchant for whisky. I’ve often found that certain stars just don’t come across well when they play too far away from their usual screen persona. Most of them have screen personas that are broad enough to encompass a fair range, but when they step out of that and play the opposite type of character for instance, it generally doesn’t work – in my mind.
Denzil Washington is a prime example. He’s made a few films where he’s played against type, and, because in the audience’s mind he’s a man with integrity and heart and warmth and compassion, we just don’t believe him when he tries to play someone who’s really bad.
Can you imagine Danny de Vito playing any sort of hero or heroic character? Unlikely to succeed, and wisely he’s stuck to his conniving, grubby-minded characters. Gene Hackman, even when playing the hero, will be fairly flawed, but he seems to have found his niche in playing characters that are untrustworthy, venal, and ruthless. Jack Nicholson has managed to bring off a few characters that are sympathetic, but it takes some doing. He has to bring the audience around to ‘his way of thinking’ as it were. (About Schmidtt is an example.)
So to return to Tom Hanks. Tom will not easily play an out and out villain. Offhand, I can’t remember him doing so. He’s been fairly rough-edged a few times, but his trademark ‘innocence’ is what he does really well. Charlie Wilson isn’t innocent. He has integrity, but it’s very mixed, and the opening scene in the movie, with him in a spa pool with several other naked people, seems uncomfortable for Hanks.
However, once we get used to Hanks in this role, the film is well worth watching. Julia Roberts makes a brief appearance early in the piece and then vanishes for a good deal of the movie, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who knows his place in movies as a wild man character, whether he’s playing good or bad) takes up the rest of the slack.
If the film wasn’t based on a true story we’d be unlikely to believe it, but since it apparently is, we have to assume that the scriptwriters haven’t played too fast and loose with the truth.
I said the movie was worth watching, nevertheless, it doesn’t seem well constructed for all that. There are several wonderful individual scenes (particularly Hoffman’s first appearance, and also his first encounter with Hanks), and the piece is uniformly well-acted, and directed, but there isn’t much suspense. It’s almost a forgone conclusion that Charlie Wilson will get his way and ‘save’ Afghanistan from the Russians. Along with Hoffman he’s a renegade who happens to be invisible enough in Congress not to cause huge anti-waves when he sets about supplying arms to the beleaguered country. And while the characters are well-drawn up to a point, I don’t know that I entirely believe in them. There were plenty of flamboyant characters in West Wing, for example, but they worked better than Charlie Wilson does, and both Hoffman and Roberts seem to be playing people who do their own thing and get away with it without a snub from anyone. Interestingly enough, Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. It has plenty of his trademarks: snappy dialogue, smart one-liners that fit the scene, good scene construction. It’s just the overall effect that doesn’t quite hold. Maybe Sorkin needed a sub-plot to offset the main story, as he so often did in the TV series. Here he’s denied that.

Actors and stars

I wrote about Adam Sandler yesterday and the way his screen persona doesn't seem a lot different from his real life persona. Persona might be the issue: having played a lot of crude-mouthed characters, perhaps that's the 'image' he now portrays in real life. It's hard to know. Screen actors, more so than stage actors perhaps, tend to mould their parts to themselves, and get parts that are moulded to their natural person. I find Danny de Vito, for instance, always seems to play loud-mouthed, and often foul-mouthed, characters. Different, but similar, to Sandler's.

Denzil Washington, on the other hand, is more in the vein of the gentlemanly person, and rarely plays a villain, especially the sort of villain who has sadistic or violent streaks. Whether these are just outside his natural acting limits, or whether he prefers not to play them, it's hard to know. He has played a few unpleasant characters, but something doesn't quite work, it seems to me, when he does. This is not to say he can't be aggressive or strong, or domineering when required. But in general it's his humanity and warmth that we go to see him for.

Maybe because we seem so close to screen actors we find it hard to distinguish between them and the kinds of roles they play. The camera doesn't let an actor away with a lot; it readily picks up false notes in a screen performance, especially that of a major star. (Character actors and supporting players are a different kettle of fish.) You can sense when a star isn't comfortable in a role. The most recent example I've seen of this was Michael Caine In Educating Rita. Caine playing a professor, even an alcoholic, washed-out professor, just didn't seem to work; and you sensed the actor being out of sympathy with the character in a number of scenes.

Johnny Depp, though he produces great characters, still brings a sensitivity and vulnerability to all his roles. This meant, when he played the writer in secret Window, he could engage our sympathy throughout the movie, and give us a nasty shock at the end when he turned out to be the murderer.

Of course, producers play to their stars' strengths. That's only natural. And I guess if a scriptwriter turns up with a story that requires a crude character in crude situations, then they'll ring Sandler's agent, or de Vito's. There's no way Washington or Depp would fit the bill. And equally, you can't see Sandler in one of the 'commanding presence' roles that Denzil Washington – or Harrison Ford – plays.

I suppose actors get cast to what they do best. Whether that's the best approach is another matter, since it never stretches the actor. Whether stars can be stretched may be another issue as well.