Movie Review: With “Suffragette” I Was Left Enraged And Grateful

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The foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.

There’s an incredible moment at the end of “Suffragette” when you realize the credits are about to roll, but the story isn’t over. You’re irritated and prickled by the story not being delivered with a neatly tied-up ending – and then in a split second flash, you realize that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do!

“Suffragette” is a drama that tracks the story of the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal state. These women were not primarily from the genteel educated classes, they were working women who had seen peaceful protests achieve nothing. Radicalized and turning to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality – their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives. Maud (Carey Mulligan) was one such foot soldier. The story of her fight for dignity is as gripping and visceral as any thriller, it is also heart-breaking and inspirational.

Academy award nominees Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter transform what could have very easily been clichéd roles into very multi-dimensional characters. Carter’s character as Edith Ellyn, brings to life a woman who is educated, and a doctor – two things that were nearly unheard of at the time. Director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan took the development of the story much further than expected. The roles of antagonists Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Sonny Watts (Ben Whishaw) were far from one-dimensional. It was refreshing to see the torn emotions that these men were experiencing. Many times throughout the movie I would have liked to have known more about their lives and how the suffragette movement changed them.

Although not all of the characters were historical, several were. Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep) was in fact the leader of the Suffragette movement. Although given equal billing with Carter and Mulligan, Streep only appears in one scene. It is a very powerful and moving one, but still, I would have been interested in seeing the character more involved in the story.

The term “suffragette” is associated with activists in the British WSPU, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, who were influenced by Russian methods of protest such as hunger strikes. Other tactics employed by members of the WSPU included chaining themselves to railings to provoke an arrest, pouring harsh chemicals into mailboxes, breaking windows at prestige buildings and nighttime arson at unoccupied buildings. Many suffragettes were imprisoned in Holloway Prison in London, and were force-fed after going on hunger strike. All of this was portrayed with great care, given to accuracy of staging, wardrobe and characterization.

The depth of emotions and self-doubt that Mulligan brings to the character of Maud are vivid. Seeing her daily struggles in the laundry where she works are painful and difficult to sit comfortably in the theater and watch. Even more so, the tangible level of degradation and injustice given to women who were the working poor in contrast to women of financial and social means, was shocking.

The first time Maud is arrested for being with the suffragettes, she is left to serve jail time because her husband cannot pay her bail. When one of the women who is being bailed out insists that her husband sign the check to bail all the women out, he refuses. The woman insists that he do it, that it’s her money after all, but he refuses – making the point that even though it was the woman’s money, her husband had complete control over it.

Until seeing “Suffragette,” I didn’t realize the level of sacrifice that these women had made. Maud is shunned by her husband, and eventually cut off from everyone she knows and loves – even her young son.

At first, Maud Watts is simply swept up in the fervor of the movement, but when she realizes in which direction the current is flowing, she instinctively starts to paddle. At the start of the film, Maud is a wife, a mother, and a diligent uncomplaining worker at the laundry. Her days are nasty, brutish and long. We see her in near complete exhaustion at home after a 14-hour day still finishing housework because it’s her “place” to do this work.

Deep down, Maud knows that something is far amiss, and it isn’t just confined to her voting status. Her male boss (a convincingly vile Geoff Bell) slimes around the factory floor like a poisonous slug, leering at, groping and menacing his female employees – partly to keep them in line, and partly for his own amusement. This low-level mistreatment of women in the workplace as a kind of sexually available livestock is a vital part of the story’s backdrop. It deprives Maud of the language and education to make sense of all that is happening to her. It’s only when she’s drafted in at the last-minute to put the case for women’s sufferage to the exchequer, David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller), that she begins to grasp the bigger picture.

Gavron and her cinematographer, Edward Grau, shoot the scenes of protest like contemporary news footage using tight framing and long depth of field to emphasize the passion and intensity of the situations being portrayed. It lends a bustling immediacy that sweeps the audience up in the mood of the moment.

“Equality is not given, it’s won!” Emmiline Pankhurst – leader of the Suffragette movement.

In select theaters now including the Angelika Film Center in Dallas