Movie review: Suffragette and the battle for women’s rights

By Jay Stone

There’s a list at the end of the earnest drama Suffragette that tells us when women got the right to vote in various countries: 1920 in the U.S., 1971 in Switzerland, not yet in Saudi Arabia (Canada, which is not on the list, let women vote in 1918).

Some of it is shocking — really, Switzerland? — but it’s a sadly familiar tale for many oppressed groups who had to fight for their rights. Suffragette is a well-meaning and familiar story that still resonates — really, Saudi Arabia? — in today’s world.

It’s set in London in 1912, at a time when women not only could not vote, but they had few rights in a marriage or at work. We meet Maude Watts (Carey Mulligan) — a fictional character thrown into a mostly factual history — working long hours in a laundry for 13 shillings a week (the men who work there earn 19 shillings) while dodging a predatory male boss and suffering dangerous working conditions. “A short life if you’re a woman,” she says.

We’ve arrived in the middle of the suffragette movement, headed by the legendary Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a brief one-note cameo), who has gone into hiding. She’s a wanted woman because she is urging her followers to use violence — throwing rocks through windows, blowing up mailboxes — to change the law. “Filthy Panks,” reads graffiti on a wall, but to the women, she’s a heroine.

Mrs. Watts (for that is how she is known) is no suffragette, but she eventually turns toward the cause when she sees the injustices around her meets women who are fighting against them: her friend Violet (Anne-Marie Duff), a battered but unbowed wife, who attends secret meetings, and Edith Ellen (Helena Bonham Carter) a chemist who is also the group’s bomb-maker.

At home, Mrs. Watts has the support of her husband Sonny (Ben Wishaw, also featured as Q in the current James Bond film), at least until she becomes active and starts the neighborhood talking. Suffragette is set in a constricted and claustrophobic society of appearances and loyalty to the authorities, and director Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane), working from a script by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady) has mounted a handsome but similarly closed-in production. Cloudy and sepia-toned, it has the carefully artificial look of a Masterpiece Theatre production.

The story is already underway when Mrs. Watts (and we) enter. The government is holding hearings on extending the franchise to women, but its refusal sparks riots of women — dressed in long black skirts and serious hats — who are punched and beaten by the fearsome police department. The authorities are represented by Brendon Gleeson as Inspector Steed, a tough cop who’s assigned to infiltrate and destroy this dangerous movement. He employs the latest technology: a portable camera, the size of a toaster, that can surreptitiously take photos of the chief offenders.

Suffragette hints at some of the excesses of any movement for freedom. The violent protests are too much for some of the suffragettes, and Bonham Carter’s character is portrayed as a woman who is risking her own health in blind obedience to the elusive leader of her cause. Mulligan is excellent as a woman who is slowly radicalized, and at great personal cost.

But those scenes are subsumed in a general sense of outrage that we’re prompted to feel. The movie opens with pompous male voices warning that if women get the vote, they will next want to run for parliament and perhaps even be in cabinet. The irony is real, but it feels too easy.

Still, Suffragette is a worthwhile reminder of how far women have come and the price they had to pay to get here. We’re left to imagine how much more there is to be done.

THE EX-PRESS, November 6, 2015

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