Patricia Clarkson is an actor who always hits the true note, but it’s been quite a while since she nabbed a movie role as full-scale and invigorating as the one she has in “Lilly.” The movie, which opened yesterday, is a whistleblower drama, based on the life of Lilly Ledbetter, who was the image of a homespun citizen — an Alabama wife and mother working as a supervisor at the local Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant — when she became an activist almost in spite of herself.
At Goodyear, Ledbetter started out in 1979 slinging tires on the factory floor. She then climbed the managerial ladder, only to keep getting knocked back down. Her work record was top drawer, but she was the only supervisor at the plant who was a woman, and that made a lot of people around her nervous. Near the end of her 20 years there, she learned she was making half of what her male colleagues did. (They were also getting jumped ahead of her with next to no training.) Trying to rectify that raw deal, she wasn’t looking to stir the pot — she just wanted a fair shake for herself and her family.
This is the kind of person (and movie character) who inevitably gets described as “scrappy” and “feisty,” yet even when Lilly is going up against the system there’s nothing flamboyant or righteous about her. Clarkson plays her in shopworn bangs, with a horse-sense Southern directness and a twinkle of reality in her eye. She shows you Lilly’s strength, her everyday touch of inner fire, but also her tentative quality, the natural hesitation of someone who isn’t a showboater, who doesn’t think of herself as a fighter for justice, especially at the moments when doing so doesn’t seem to have much of an upside.
For a long time now, whistleblower movies have had a certain paradox built into them. We see characters like the ones played by Russell Crowe in “The Insider” or Al Pacino in “Serpico” or Meryl Streep in “Silkwood,” and the point is supposed to be that these are ordinary folks who became heroes, molded by circumstance into better versions of themselves. Yet as indelible as most of those movies are, there’s a way they have of elevating their heroes’ crusader quality into something iconic. That’s certainly true of Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” and it’s true of one of the grandaddies of them all — “Norma Rae,” with Sally Field rising up to lead a textile union. In a way, these characters all become larger-than-life, and that’s part of the glory of Hollywood.
Patricia Clarkson can be larger-than-life (when I saw her onstage as Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she had a luminous power), but the beauty of her performance in “Lilly” is that she makes Lilly Ledbetter plainspoken, dogged, a woman in way over her head. She makes her one of us. Lilly isn’t out to shake things up. When she discovers (through an anonymous list left in her locker) that she has been getting the shaft on her salary, she visits a local law firm and is told, at first, that she has no case. But due to the diligence of one of the lawyers, Jon Goldfarb (Thomas Sadoski), she lands in court, and in what feels like one of those adrenaline-rush-of-victory moments, the jury finds the salary question in her favor, awarding her damages in the millions. We think: Hallelejuah!
But part of the message of “Lilly” is that it’s not the 1970s anymore. There are now layers of corporate and political bureaucracy designed to monkey wrench the very brand of whistleblowing that defined that earlier rabble-rousing era. In “Lilly,” the Goodyear corporation is, of course, going to appeal the jury’s decision, and despite all the evidence the decision is overturned. So it’s back to square one.
And this keeps happening. That’s the system now. The case, which is about the primal issue of gender equality (i.e., equal pay for equal work), will go all the way to the Supreme Court, where it will once again be shot down, though not by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (the clips of Ginsburg discussing the Ledbetter case that are threaded throughout the film add up to a kind of Greek chorus). It’s the media that picks up on Lilly’s story, making her the public face of the issue. But in Congress, the Republicans of the post-Gingrich era are graded on a corporate scorecard, where if they don’t vote the “right” way they‘ll be denied the funds they need to secure re-election. That’s the system too.
The case “Lilly” is about keeps slipping back to square one. Yet the slow-burn force of the movie is that, as Rachel Feldman has directed it, with a fixation on the details of process comparable to what we saw in “Lincoln” or the documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” the story is really about how America works now — not as tumultuous political drama, but as ordinary citizens carving out justice one ruling and statute and red-tape tangle at a time. Lilly, who has a complicated home life, grounds herself in the love of her fuddy-duddy husband, Charles (the superb John Benjamin Hickey), but her son, Philip (Will Pullen), is a teenage ne’er-do-well who drops out and abandons the family, which haunts Lilly. And Charles, along the way, gets diagnosed with serious skin cancer. The way Clarkson plays it, these traumas are too consuming to allow Lilly to become some “selfless” activist.
The case winds up turning on a moral-logistical issue: Was every unequal paycheck Lilly received an act of discrimination? Or did she have just 180 days from the first paycheck to make that claim? The whole movie is Lilly jumping through hoops, and it’s Clarkson’s performance that makes this work, since the real drama is what Lilly feels at every turn — the hope built up and dashed, the passion and frustration, at one point the tears flecked with rage. Yet Lilly never loses that gleam. By the time she heads to Washington to lobby for what became the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama), she knows who she’s doing this for. Every woman in America.
Of course, when I talk about how justice in America “now” works, I’m not referencing the last four months. That’s a different story. Yet it’s one that couldn’t be more relevant to the everyday-rebel spirit of “Lilly.” The film’s message is that an ordinary woman — not an icon, not a freedom fighter — is exactly what it takes to make a difference. That’s a message that reaches back to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” though it’s also a message that has never been more topical than it is now. As autocracy takes hold in America, we now have a country of 330 million people who are all cowed. Taking action is something we don’t know how to do anymore. “Lilly” is a movie that says: Here’s what to do. Follow the lead of this woman who followed the lead of the basic desire for fairness that was in her heart. The way Patricia Clarkson plays Lilly Ledbetter, she’s someone to aspire to because she’s got what all of us have: a hunger for something larger than injustice.
