Film Marcus Berkmann
I’LL COME CLEAN: I couldn’t get a ticket for the new Bond film so I went to see Suffragette instead. Oh, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth! I had readied myself for explosions, whispering villains, car chases and Daniel Craig pulling that face that suggests several weeks of painful constipation. Instead, I had two hours of worthy and relentless gloom to look forward to. I can tell you now that I was not a merry man.
In its early stages, Suffragette certainly piles on the agony. Carey Mulligan plays Maud Watts, a young and downtrodden laundry worker in Befnal Green in 1912. Her husband, Ben Whishaw, is wellmeaning but weak. Her boss, who like most men in this film sports an enormous panto-villain moustache, is a bully and part-time rapist. But Maud has her five-year-old son, George, and ... that’s it, really. It’s not much of a life. One day she is in the West End staring at all the beautiful clothes in a shop window, when a horde of suffragettes start throwing rocks at it. One of them, she realises, is a fellow-worker and a bit of a live wire, played by Anne-marie Duff. The Duff lures her into her suffragette life, where she meets Helena Bonham Carter, the pharmacist’s wife who would like to have been a doctor but her father wouldn’t let her. Maud finds herself giving evidence to a House of Commons committee that is considering whether to recommend that women be given the vote. David Lloyd George appears concerned and sympathetic, but he, too, is disfigured by substantial face furniture so we know he is a wrong ’un. With each demonstration and arrest, Maud’s torments increase. She loses everything, inch by inch, and with nothing left to lose, becomes ever more radicalised. And just as she is drawn into the cause, so we are drawn into her story. Itchy in the first half-hour, I found myself completely gripped in the last hour, as the tale weaves cleverly towards what you slowly realise is its inevitable conclusion.
Suffragette has its problems. The men, with possibly one exception, are cartoonishly unpleasant. Much cackling is done. The dialogue can be very clunky, as vital exposition is crowbarred in to keep us up to speed with events. And when Brendan Gleeson, playing a policeman so palpably evil that he is given a full bristly beard, picks up a newspaper near the end and sees the headline ‘DERBY DAY APPROACHES’, he suddenly realises what is going to happen even though (i) he wouldn’t, and (ii) no newspaper would ever have such a stupid headline. Melodrama lurks in every darkened corner.
At the same time, it’s a mighty effective piece of filmmaking. Carey Mulligan earns her fee with another strong yet nuanced performance: the camera hones slightly sadistically in on her almost ceaseless suffering. (Although I did notice that, when she becomes a fully committed suffragette, her clothes suddenly become much more stylish and expensive. How did that happen?) The actress long known in this house as ‘Helena Bumbum Carter’ unfurls her delicious posh voice to great effect, and there’s a well judged cameo by Meryl Streep as Mrs Pankhurst, who is much talked about and seen in photos but only actually appears in a couple of brief scenes. ‘Never surrender! Never give up the fight!’ is her catchphrase, like a superhero in crinolines. I’ll admit that by the end I was blubbing away with the best of them, and not thinking about Aston Martins or dry Martinis at all.