You won't encounter any surprises in this well-intentioned and mostly well-acted film. The script was the problem.
The extent of the very real indignities endured by the women workers could have been established in much less time. About an hour of this film was devoted to piling one horrifying incident on another. It appeared as though no male worker was uneasy about any of this, and no supervisory personnel were at all uneasy about something they obviously knew was going on. No one had a crisis of conscience. The supervisory personnel ignored the problem because they, too, were sexist pigs, rather than because they were afraid to change anything by challenging a bureaucracy they were a part of.
In light of all of this black-and-white posturing, the last minute conversions of everyone seemed a bit unbelievable. The high school boyfriend-turned-sexual-abuser decides to become honest on the witness stand, finally becoming a person rather than an abstraction of evil. Why did he suddenly decide to do the right thing, after being a near-rapist himself? Why did he go from being a high school friend to an arch-enemy? Dad's conversion when Mom left him is similarly swift and unexplained--he showed absolutely no affection for his daughter before that. It would have been nice to know the source of his animosity, so that we could see why it was changed. And the director sabotages Dad's conversion, during his speech to the Union, by panning away from him to his daughter for her reaction, when they were standing so close a two-shot could have shown both faces.
Similarly, the teenage son--why does he automatically believe everyone except his mother? I couldn't see why--particularly because he would be in a position to know whether or not his mom is a slut--she seemed to have very little of a social life. And how does a simple conversation with the kid suddenly change everything? Personally, I found the mother-son relationship, including what caused it and how it would be resolved, to be a more interesting theme than the movie's actual theme. Laws may be passed to address sexual discrimination, but poisoned family relations cannot be remedied by legislation.
The extent of the very real indignities endured by the women workers could have been established in much less time. About an hour of this film was devoted to piling one horrifying incident on another. It appeared as though no male worker was uneasy about any of this, and no supervisory personnel were at all uneasy about something they obviously knew was going on. No one had a crisis of conscience. The supervisory personnel ignored the problem because they, too, were sexist pigs, rather than because they were afraid to change anything by challenging a bureaucracy they were a part of.
In light of all of this black-and-white posturing, the last minute conversions of everyone seemed a bit unbelievable. The high school boyfriend-turned-sexual-abuser decides to become honest on the witness stand, finally becoming a person rather than an abstraction of evil. Why did he suddenly decide to do the right thing, after being a near-rapist himself? Why did he go from being a high school friend to an arch-enemy? Dad's conversion when Mom left him is similarly swift and unexplained--he showed absolutely no affection for his daughter before that. It would have been nice to know the source of his animosity, so that we could see why it was changed. And the director sabotages Dad's conversion, during his speech to the Union, by panning away from him to his daughter for her reaction, when they were standing so close a two-shot could have shown both faces.
Similarly, the teenage son--why does he automatically believe everyone except his mother? I couldn't see why--particularly because he would be in a position to know whether or not his mom is a slut--she seemed to have very little of a social life. And how does a simple conversation with the kid suddenly change everything? Personally, I found the mother-son relationship, including what caused it and how it would be resolved, to be a more interesting theme than the movie's actual theme. Laws may be passed to address sexual discrimination, but poisoned family relations cannot be remedied by legislation.