MOVIES: Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)

In the few years since she made her breakthrough to American audiences (well, American art-house audiences, at any rate) in Happy-Go-Lucky, I have not been particularly fond of Sally Hawkins, so I didn't go into Made in Dagenham with particularly high hopes. I was quite happily surprised. The movie is a standard issue based-on-a-true-story uplifting period piece, but Hawkins is less grating than I've found her in the past, and she's surrounded by an excellent supporting cast.

The story boils down to Norma Rae set in 1968 England, where Rita O'Grady is of one of the few female employees at the local Ford plant. The women are machinists, sewing the covers for the car seats. Their frustration at having their work defined as "unskilled" (and thus, lower on the pay scale) leads them to a one-day strike that rapidly grows bigger, to the point where the Secretary of State (Miranda Richardson) is involved and the issue has broadened to whether women should be paid equally with men.

Richardson is just one of the talented actors playing small roles here. Bob Hoskins is quite funny as the one male labor leader who supports the women's strike wholeheartedly; Daniel Mays makes a strong impression as Rita's husband, who can't quite cope with how his wife's activism changes his own life; Richard Schiff blusters nicely as the American lawyer sent by Ford to resolve the problem; and Rosamund Pike has a lovely calm dignity as the wife of a Ford executive.

Hawkins is good throughout, and does a nice job of showing us Rita's growth from bystander to activist; she's especially fine in the last act, and her big speeches at the end of the movie are completely convincing.

There are a few clunky moments, and a subplot involving a coworker's husband suffering from PTSD after WWII feels awkwardly tacked on. The casual sexism of the era is piled on just a bit too heavily, to the point where some of the men (Richardson's assistants, for instance) are reduced to cartoons.

But even though it's a predictable formula piece, the movie moves along at a nice clip, and there are enough good performances to make it a pleasant minor entertainment.