When patients' rights lawyer Colette Hughes goes to meet her new client, Eleanor Riese, a patient in the psychiatric unit of a San Francisco hospital, she has no idea that besides taking on an uphill legal battle to improve treatment for mental patients in hospitals, she is meeting a woman who will make it her mission to transform Colette's workaholic life.
Though 55 Steps, well, side-steps the alarming political issues, with the doctors in question as cover for the true medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex villains, at its core this film transcends class as a remarkable female bonding story.
Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.
Considering the ramifications of its true-life story, this earnest legal melodrama about fighting the system never achieves the necessary urgency or poignancy.
