The hand that rocks the cradle seeks the vote
Unapologetic portrayal of Edwardian England takes a less direct approach in telling story of real heroines
Suffragette has the power to shock even those familiar with the early days of the feminist movement it dramatizes.
How could a country as civilized as Great Britain stoop to beating, imprisoning, force-feeding and ostracizing females seeking women’s suffrage, or the simple right to vote?
These shameful acts from the early 20th century are briskly brought to the screen by director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan, with strong craft support establishing the smoke and bustle of Edwardian England.
Carey Mulligan leads the cast as a woman spurred to revolt by conscience and fate; Meryl Streep and Helena Bonham Carter are among her co-stars.
Unlike The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic that won awards for both Morgan and Streep, Suffragette approaches history tangentially rather than directly. Mulligan’s character, Maud Watts, is fictional, an amalgam of working-class women who didn’t see themselves as rebels but who could no longer abide the demeaning patriarchy that ruled their lives.
She bears witness to two real historical figures in the film: Streep’s barely seen but keenly felt suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst, whose rallying cry “Deeds, not words!” still echoes; and Natalie Press’s movement martyr Emily Davison, whose public self-sacrifice at the 1913 Epsom Derby galvanized the suffragettes more than any speech or rally ever could.
When the story opens in the London of 1912, Maud is a beleaguered laundry worker, wife (to Ben Wishaw’s judgmental Sonny) and mother of a young son. She has no interest in the Women’s Social and Political Union, a Pankhurst-led group that seeks attention through acts of civil disobedience and by hurling bricks through shop windows.
But she’s drawn to the WSPU after witnessing a demo and later being called to testify in Parliament when her militant co-worker Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) is unable to appear.
Mulligan’s gift for summoning empathy comes to the fore as melodrama ensues, and Maud endures estrangement from her husband and son, and abuse from the police, the latter embodied by Brendan Gleeson’s patronizing and conspiring Insp. Arthur Steed.
Even as the focus is repeatedly drawn to Maud’s struggles, and those of such coconspirators as Bonham Carter’s Edith Ellyn, a pharmacist turned bomb maker (and another composite character), history keeps insisting that the real-life heroes in their midst might have made for a stronger account.
Emmeline Pankhurst is surely worthy of her own movie, just as Martin Luther King Jr. was in last year’s Selma. So is Emily Davison, whose motivations for her astounding act, recreated in the film, are still debated.
But Suffragette understandably makes no apologies for its approach or the narrowness of its narrative. Like the global suffrage movement it recalls, and as the end credits underline, there is still much of the story to tell.