Strike Busting

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NORMA RAE

Directed by Martin Ritt Screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.

Norma Rae is the story of trashy white woman (Sally Field), a textile worker in a small Southern town, who discovers that she actually has a social conscience when a labor organizer (Ron Leibman) arrives at her mill to establish a union. Despite his education and his uplifting concerns, he is a rainmaker figure, a man capable of breaking through the various dins (of factory, family and juke joints) that have drowned out the voice of Norma Rae's best instincts. His winning out over her suspicions (there is a romantic attraction here that is wisely left unconsummated) and their joint triumph over a union-busting mill management are the basis for a film that is serious and intelligent, but that attracts more respect than affection.

The fault is surely not Field's or Leibman's. Each is at once tough and vulnerable and, above all, engagingly high-spirited. And their roles are well written. Norma Rae's somewhat checkered sexual history, we come to understand, represents the only locally available outlet for a venturesome, restless but essentially very moral spirit. She has, we see, merely been waiting for something more rewarding to occupy her energies and her realistic, feisty if untutored mind. The character of Reuben, the organizer, represents a triumph of sorts. He is the first accurate representation onscreen of a type that has proved to be dramatically elusive: the New York Jewish intellectual-activist. Such a person is usually the odd man out, an exotic everywhere in America beyond his native streets. Yet frequently he is capable of winning out over prejudice and suspicion with his quick wit and his obvious humanity.

How is it that the movie fails to engage us? There is the well-realized meeting between two curious and disparate minds. Added to this is a sweet courtship and real marriage between Field and a gas station attendant (Beau Bridges), a man with few brains but good, patient instincts. The problem lies in story development. There is something dreadfully predictable about the way the tale moves. When Norma Rae finally causes all the machines in the mill to be stopped through the sheer force of her belief in justice, our response is to wonder why it took so long for the film makers to reach this big scene. It is the same with other sequences: company goons on the attack, the death of Norma Rae's father from overwork. There is an awful familiarity here and in Martin Ritt's conventional staging. The angles and editing are those of 30 years ago, and they seem less a reversion to classicism than a confession of creative failure.

It hurts to say this. We need more movies about the realities of workaday life in America and more about ordinary women dealing with ordinary problems of making a life and a living. One very much wants to like Norma Rae better than one in good critical conscience can.

-- Richard Schickel

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