A Restrained ‘Suffragette’ Treads Carefully on Its Way to Award Season

In Movies & TV by April Snellingsleave a COMMENT

Suffragette, the new film that dramatizes the struggle for women’s voting rights in early 20th-century England, finds an unconventional window into its depiction of a civil-rights movement: Rather than training its narrative on the iconic and controversial figure who led the charge, it finds its heroine in a nearly anonymous foot soldier who stumbles into the fight by accident.

The leader in question is Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union and one of the best-known women’s-rights activists of her time (or any other). Eighty-seven years after her death, she’s still a towering, divisive figure, so it’s appropriate (though disappointing for Meryl Streep fans) that she exists in Suffragette as more of a force than a person, spoken of constantly but only appearing in two brief scenes before being ushered out of the frame—and completely out of the movie—by her bodyguards.

The weight of carrying this stately, somber movie, then, falls to Carey Mulligan as Maud Watts, a 24-year-old laundress who has as much of a voice in her home and work lives as in the political arena—which is to say, none at all. Maud has resigned herself to a life of suffering in silence. She spends long, arduous hours at the laundry, endures constant sexual harassment from her weaselly boss, and is barely more than a shadow at home with her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), and their young son, George (Adam Michael Dodd).

Maud doesn’t exactly lament her lot in life, because it has never occurred to her that working-class British women could have any other. That changes when she stumbles across a woman hurling bricks through a shop window; Maud has accidentally discovered the Women’s Social and Political Union, a group that has begun to advocate militant tactics in their effort to secure voting rights for women. At first Maud is reluctant to join the struggle, but she gradually realizes that Pankhurst and her followers are striving for something even more important than the vote: They’re fighting to win women the voices they’ve been denied in every aspect of life.

Directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Abi Morgan, Suffragette picks up in 1912 and centers on the uniquely fascinating pivot from peaceful protest to civil disobedience and militantism. The story it depicts is a stirring one, to say the least, and one that’s no less important or relevant today, more than a century after the moving newsreel footage that carries Suffragette into its closing credits.

So it’s curious and disappointing, then, that Suffragette keeps its subject at arm’s length and doesn’t delve into some of the more interesting aspects of its story. It hints at unsettling ideas, such as the beginnings of a surveillance state and connections between domestic violence and political oppression, but mostly tosses them aside in favor of safer ground and inevitable Oscar-baiting. Its characters often feel thinly drawn—there’s an entire movie’s worth of missed opportunities in Brendan Gleeson’s Inspector Steed, a surly policeman who’s torn between sympathy for Maud and his obligation to fulfill his duties.

Technically, though, Suffragette is a powerhouse. Eduard Grau’s moody, murky cinematography casts everything in a pall of morning mist and coal dust, and Alexandre Desplat’s score is suitably tense and melancholy. The performances are mostly excellent, though its most memorable character isn’t its most famous one, or even its main one; Suffragette is owned by Anne-Marie Duff, who gives an electric performance as Violet, one of Maud’s coworkers and fellow suffragists. Helena Bonham Carter has one of her best turns in years as Edith Ellyn, a pharmacist-turned-bomb-maker who acts as something of a general in Pankhurst’s unofficial army.

Ultimately, Suffragette is too restrained and calculated for its own good. It’s well-made and certainly worth watching, but it’s also polemical when it should be rousing and pulls back when it really needs to charge ahead. It feels like the important history lesson it is but leaves the most emotionally and politically charged aspects of the suffrage movement relatively untouched.

April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Share this Post