A dreary but worthy look at grim history
“Suffragette” dramatizes the battle for women’s suffrage in Great Britain, which was particularly protracted and nasty. This dreary but well-made movie relates a grim, disturbing period in which British women struggled against a monolith that would not budge, and there was violence on both sides.
Screenwriter Abi Morgan and director Sarah Gavron tell this history through fictional characters who interact with real-life characters and take part in historical events. It’s probably evidence of the film’s effectiveness that it becomes disappointing and even a little frustrating to find out that Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter play fictional creations. But they were emblematic of others, and all the major events depicted did take place.
The immediate surprise of “Suffragette,” for those familiar only with the American suffrage story, is that the last years of the suffrage struggle in Britain took on the contours of a terrorist insurgency. Frustrated by a complete lack of progress, even with an otherwise reformist government in power, suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst instructed women to start destroying property — smashing windows, blowing up communications lines and, in one instance, blowing up the house of a politician while the building was still under construction.
At least they didn’t kill anybody, though the government did. Legal demonstrations were broken up through police violence that in some cases ended in fatalities. When imprisoned suffragettes went on a hunger strike, they were force fed in the most brutal and barbaric of ways.
Of course, if we’re talking about bleak and hopeless, who better to embody women’s plight than Mulligan, who has a way of looking depressed even when she’s smiling. She plays Maud, a 24-yearold woman who works in the laundry, and that Mulligan doesn’t really look 24 is sort of the point. Maud has been working in the same awful place since childhood, making very little money and watching her youth drain away.
We see the British struggle from all angles, especially that of the working class, for whom suffrage was related to other things, such as the push for humane labor practices. We also see how the degradation of working-class men exacerbated the miseries of women. In “Suffragette,” Maud’s husband knows that he’s on the bottom of the social ladder, but at least he can feel that he is his wife’s ruler and master. To surrender that would be to give up his only scrap of status.
Bonham Carter plays a radical, middle-class woman who wants to blow up everything, and, no surprise, she makes you believe it. As for Meryl Streep, who is in all the advertising, she appears in only one long scene and then briefly in another. But, typical of this actress, she finds a way to make her very brief role interesting: As Pankhurst, she gives a speech, and just by the nature and the detail with which she does a specific, upper-class British accent — the kind you hear only on 19th-century phonograph recordings — she brings us back to another century.
“Suffragette” is no joyful romp, nor is it even an inspiring tale. It’s more like a depressing look at what a lot of people needlessly went through to secure rights that should have been theirs from birth. But by avoiding the usual clichés, “Suffragette” finds its way to its own, specific integrity. It’s a movie that’s easier to respect than love, but it is something to respect.