It’s been kind of a slow May around here. We’ve only seen Ran, Re-Animator and Lilly. I’ve had a hard time getting into Kurosawa, but I found Ran quite wonderful. Easy to follow despite a rather intricate plot (based on/inspired by “King Lear”) and a near three-hour runtime. The year 1985 also gave Re-Animator, which is probably the crowning achievement of the Empire Pictures filmmaking endeavor, and still really holds up after 40 years, with only a few of its low-budget seams showing.

Lilly is a straight-up advertisement for Democrats, and lord knows they need the help. We stumbled into this because I mistook Patricia Clarkson for Patricia Heaton, and mentioned that if Patricia (Heaton) were in the film, it probably wouldn’t be just a tongue-bath of left-wing figureheads. A fatal mistake my friends. This 90-minutes-but-seems-like-150-minutes paean to Democratic shibboleth Lilly Ledbetter features copious actual interviews with Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself. And Hillary. And Obama. And, ballsiest of all, the Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy.

No one championed women like ol’ Ted, amirite?

I realized we were in trouble about ten minutes in, and spent the rest of the movie trying to find things to admire. Like, there are a few points where the music is quite effective. Since the movie has no composer, I assume that the music supervisor and editors put together stock music, but they did so effectively from time-to-time.

Politics aside, this is embarrassingly incompetent and earnest, on the level of certain Christian movies we’ve seen, but tawdry.

In the first 20 or so minutes we get three—count ’em, three—”you go, girl” montage scenes as the brave Mrs. Ledbetter decides she wants to work for Goodyear.

By the way, none of my snark should be seen as reflecting on the real Mrs. Ledbetter, who probably had some valid grievances and was also probably a good person.

But this movie is sort of like The Central Park Five, where I came in to the movie on roughly the same side as the filmmaker only to come out thinking the opposite. Like, if your story is so weak you have to paint all your ideological enemies as evil cartoons, you must have very little confidence in the actual righteousness of your characters.

As befits a 2025 Democrat, the movie spends so much time on “you go, girl,” the movie’s obvious dramatic points are given short shrift. We start with Lilly saying “I want to get a job, even though you don’t want me to, Mr. Man” and then Mr. Man says, “Well, go ahead and get a job because you’re great and you’re going to do it anyway.”

Tight stuff. Riveting.

Worst of all is the relationship with her son. She’s a hard-ass with her son, to the point where he’s pissed off at her and runs away to California, ne’er to be seen until a decade or more later. My time-frames are murky because the movie de-emphasizes this whole critical dramatic line.

We end up with no real idea why he was pissed, and when she comes to…sorta apologize?…toward the end of the movie, it lands like a wet sack of Washington Post print editions.

So, the movie starts with the three “you go, girl” montages, which drag the movie to a halt. Imagine starting Rocky with “Gonna Fly Now”. You’d be saying: “Who is this guy? Why does he hate sides of beefs so much?”

But if that weren’t enough (and, by gosh, don’ t you think it oughtta be?), we go from setup to actual interviews of Ruth Bader Ginsburg talking about this case!

This is the dramatic equivalent of argument-by-authority. “This story is important and dramatic because a dead Supreme Court Justice says so!”

Any abilities the actors have are neutered by this approach. “We’re not showing you this because we’re artists who are good at what we do. We’re showing you this because MESSAGE! MESSAGE! MESSAGE!”

Probably the lowest level of competent cinematography is “The audience can see what’s going on.” Think, for example, Manos: The Hands of Fate, which fails to meet this bar. Well, Lilly meets this bar. It’s arguably better than Manos, though much, much less interesting.

Manos, at least, has an ending one could regard as surprising, if supremely distasteful.

In Lilly, there’s never any question what the outcome will be (and I didn’t follow the story at the time, so it’s not about historical events). Nothing matters but the woman won and beat out all those mean Republican men. If she’s not there when her husband dies, well, that’s too bad for him. If her son spends half his life alienated from her, well, that’s just the patriarchy or something.

There’s never any question about anything, really. The camera is never used to tell the story. The music, which is sparse, does its best with the thin gruel on the screen. The actors are constantly being interrupted and never have a chance.

As I told The Boy on the way out, as we untangled the wacky misunderstanding that led to us seeing this slop, back in my day, we had propaganda movies, but they were at least good movies. The China Syndrome and Silkwood were far more damaging to society than this movie will ever be (because, for one thing, who’s gonna watch this who doesn’t already agree with it 100%, other than by mistake?) but they were entertaining as films.

I use the word “slop” advisedly. This film could’ve been made by an AI.

This movie even attempts a Silkwood by having Ledbetter be rear-ended at one point. Mike Nichols ended Silkwood by having her look back in the rear view mirror, lights of the truck coming up behind her reflecting in her eyes. Fade to black! I still remember it, probably accurately, decades later. (Oh, huh, I guess it’s also the movie poster. So…not too hard to remember.)

Like every other possible moment of dramatic tension in this movie, Ledbetter gets rear-ended, two or three times, by an angry driver who might be affiliated with her political enemies. We just have to assume that it is, because there’s no follow-up, no investigation, it doesn’t cause her to waver in the slightest. We get Clarkson’s trauma in the moment, but the movie does nothing with that.

It’s a shame because, like I said, there’s a good story here. But this is the dramatic equivalent of “clap humor”.

Winner of two DEI awards, I hope this is the worst movie I see this year.