Movie Review: LILLY

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 16th, 2025 / 01:32 AM

LILLY movie poster | ©2025 Blue Harbor Entertainment

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Patricia Clarkson, John Benjamin Hickey, Thomas Sadoski, Will Pullen, Deirdre Lovejoy, Josh McDermitt, Bethany Anne Lind, Keith Brooks, Paul Teal, Amy Parrish, Rhoda Griffis, Judd Lorman, Robert Praigo, Darin Toonder
Writers: Rachel Feldman and Adam Prince, based on the life of Lilly Ledbetter and GRACE AND GRIT by Lilly Ledbetter and Lanier Scott Isom
Director: Rachel Feldman
Distributor: Blue Harbor Entertainment
Release Date: May 9, 2025

The full title of the Fair Pay Act is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. How there came to be a Fair Pay Act, and why Ledbetter’s name is on it, is the subject of LILLY.

LILLY opens at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, where Lilly Ledbetter (played here by Patricia Clarkson) of Jacksonville, Alabama, takes the stage. She acknowledges being surprised, as well as humbled, at winding up addressing the cheering crowd.

After the song “The Daughters” by Little Big Town plays under the opening credits, we’re in sepia-toned 1979, when Lilly informs her husband Charles (John Benjamin Hickey) that she’s taken a job at the local Goodyear Tire Plant.

Charles is furious that Lilly has taken a job at all. He wants her to be a stay-at-home mom to their twins, and his pride is hurt that she feels the economic need to have outside employment. He’s also upset that she did it without telling him first.

Lilly lays out the practical situation, which is that Charles has three jobs and they’re still not meeting their bills. Charles, recognizing the fact that he’s married to a very determined woman, calms down.

This is actually the first and last we see of Charles objecting to Lilly’s actions. He’s thereafter very supportive.

LILLY remains in desaturated sepia visuals as it chronicles Lilly being repeatedly promoted and then repeatedly demoted at Goodyear over a span of nineteen years. She is groped, has to stop some of the male shop employees from sexually assaulting a young woman coworker, and is intentionally injured by someone on the shop floor.

In 1999, Lilly receives an anonymous note documenting how much less she is being paid than her male coworkers. She is almost immediately pushed out of her job.

At this point, LILLY the film goes to full color, and Lilly the person goes to the law firm of Wiggins & Quinn to seek legal assistance. The head of the firm thinks Lilly’s case, while appalling in its injustice, is outside the scope of what they do.

Spunky associate lawyer Jon Goldfarb (Thomas Sadowski), though, thinks there’s a chance this could set a precedent. Even with his ambitions, he has no idea how far Lilly’s fight will ultimately go.

In some ways LILLY, directed by Rachel Feldman from a screenplay she and Adam Prince wrote, based on both the life of Ledbetter and the book GRACE AND GRIT by Ledbetter and Lanier Scott Isom, is a conventional combination of courtroom saga and biopic.

In other ways, LILLY puts the “docu” in docudrama, with extensive footage of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and clips of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, then-Senator Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and then-Senator Hillary Clinton all speaking about aspects of the Ledbetter legal effort.

This lends undeniable verisimilitude to the overall story, even when we wonder at some choices of what’s included and what’s excluded. There are events that Lilly describes that seem like they could have easily been included onscreen rather than simply discussed.

On the flip side, while the spousal relationship between Lilly and Charles is genuinely affecting, an ongoing subplot about their son Philip (Will Pullen) feels like an interruption that has little to do with the rest of the action.

The political and business world machinations, and the reasons behind them, are interesting, though the scenes covering this aspect are somewhat perfunctory. Especially because these things continue to surface in the present (i.e., corporations trying to get out of paying pensions, firing older workers so that younger workers can be brought in at lower pay, etc.), a little more dynamism seems in order.

Clarkson brings an authenticity to Lilly’s exhaustion, fear and increasing forcefulness. Hickey gives Charles the rectitude that makes him believable as a military commander, and a tenderness that gives him credence as a man in a long, strong marriage.

Something perhaps worth noting about LILLY the film and the Fair Pay Act itself is that, while the legal case is framed as being about gender rights and these are addressed, many laws that govern equal pay for equal work across gender, racial and age lines had already been on the books for decades. They simply were (and in far too many instances, sometimes still are) thwarted or ignored completely. The Fair Pay Act mainly keeps employers from running the clock out on complaints.

LILLY is ultimately about how sometimes big victories are only possible because of smaller, more complex wins. That the film isn’t structured in a way to make this point more clearly means that it robs itself of some nuance. Still, it is worth seeing, even if some of what it has to show us is sadly all too familiar.

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