Suf­fragette

For bet­ter and for worse, Sarah Gavron’s new film, Suf­fragette, is con­cerned with an anti­cli­max. On a lit­er­al, for­mal lev­el, it presents his­to­ry as ago­nis­ing­ly piece­meal, a series of loose­ly inter­con­nect­ed inci­dents which are under­tak­en at a moment’s notice and with only a cur­so­ry dis­cus­sion as to their inten­tions and targets.

It’s anti­cli­mac­tic, too, in that here is a film con­cern­ing arguably the most emi­nent con­gre­ga­tion of female activists fight­ing for accep­tance and equal­i­ty in mod­ern his­to­ry, and we know with the gift of hind­sight that the spoils at the end of their vio­lent cam­paign are mea­gre at best. Cer­tain­ly, change was impact­ed as a result of their heavy sac­ri­fice, but the shady spec­tre of ingrained belief – that men and women are two sep­a­rate species and should be treat­ed as such – remains preva­lent and, in some locales, unchallenged.

Screen­writer Abi Mor­gan has been sad­dled with the unen­vi­able task of cap­tur­ing and fram­ing a vic­to­ry – Pyrrhic or oth­er­wise – to meet the demands of escapist movie audi­ences who require cause for cel­e­bra­tion. Because we wouldn’t be sat here if the whole thing was a right­eous blow-out. The title of the film is con­spic­u­ous­ly sin­gu­lar, refer­ring to Carey Mulligan’s Maud, a tac­i­turn laun­dress with a glint in her eye, a Vera Drake cock-er-née drawl, and a nice line in tilt­ed navy berets. She is our con­duit into Edwar­dian-era, pro­to-fem­i­nist empow­er­ment, her innate sense of cheery sub­servience hav­ing been chipped away over the years by an inef­fec­tu­al hus­band (Ben Whishaw), a lech­er­ous boss (Geoff Bell) and tyran­ni­cal cop­per (Bren­dan Gleeson).

At its best, Suf­fragette is a film about tak­ing heed of the ben­e­fits of democ­ra­cy, even when that democ­ra­cy isn’t work­ing for you. It cri­tiques politi­cians – harsh­ly, but fair­ly – in their inabil­i­ty to see the prob­lems that sit right at the end of their bul­bous noses. You could switch out the cause of uni­ver­sal female suf­frage with any hot but­ton polit­i­cal con­cern, and the film would serve it amply. That’s both its great suc­cess and its great fail­ing – in mak­ing this strug­gle feel gener­ic, it betrays the bloody defi­ance in which these women were reg­u­lar­ly engag­ing, as well as the fact that theirs was a specif­i­cal­ly defined entitlement.

The prob­lem with this movie, and with many movies like it, is a des­per­a­tion to make it known that the peo­ple we’re watch­ing are great, they are heroes and they changed the world as we know it. This is often attained by stat­ing the fact point blank, though here it’s achieved by the strict divid­ing lines of all female char­ac­ters being good and all male char­ac­ters being bad. There are no Suf­fragettes in Suf­fragette who found fault in the meth­ods of the illu­sive Emme­line Pankhurst (a gussied-up cameo by Meryl Streep), who assured that years of pas­sive strug­gle had been use­less and that civ­il dis­obe­di­ence was the order of the day. Only Marie-Anne Duff’s Vio­let Cam­bridge is shown as option­ing out of nec­es­sary activ­i­ties, though only due to a fear of return­ing to prison, noth­ing that might infer inter­nal antagonisms.

It would seem futile to com­plain that this film wasn’t more like Steve McQueen’s 2008 debut fea­ture, Hunger, that is to say an exem­plary and nuanced depic­tion of the point where protest mutates into self-sac­ri­fice. While their the­mat­ic aims are sim­i­lar, the styl­is­tic aims couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent. The for­mer involves gru­elling las­si­tude, while the lat­ter is packed with inci­dent. The most effec­tive sequences in Suf­fragette are those in which Gavron chron­i­cles the process of hor­rors that befell these women, such as being force-fed in prison. But this can’t be that film. It’s not built that way. That’s not its intention.

A few hor­rif­ic con­nec­tive fudges to make sure that cer­tain char­ac­ters are all in the same place at the same time sours the expe­ri­ence dur­ing a rushed final stretch. It’s a strange pos­i­tive, though, that you’re left with the bit­ter­sweet feel­ing that these are peo­ple you want to spend more time with, to learn more about, that the film cuts you off short. Mulligan’s indomitable every­woman is a hum­drum char­ac­ter imbued with life and warmth via the actor’s appar­ent refusal to suc­cumb to gar­ish melo­dra­ma. She makes cer­tain it’s a tougher film than expect­ed, with reg­u­lar bouts of suf­fer­ing sel­dom lin­gered over.

The film’s most mov­ing moment, how­ev­er, is a cli­mac­tic hard-cut from a staged funer­al pro­ces­sion for a fall­en con­script to news­reel footage of the real event. It’s not just the twist­ing pha­lanx of women in wide-brimmed hats sober­ly march through the streets, using the body of a mar­tyr as a polit­i­cal bar­gain­ing chip. It’s that film is itself a polit­i­cal tool, and that Gavron and Mor­gan at least attempt to wield it in the same con­fronta­tion­al man­ner as their forebears.