'Suffragette' Comes Out Swinging

There’s a tendency, among historical dramas about social movements, to make the topic at hand ... sexy, for lack of a better term. To make winding historical events palatable to modern audiences, it’s easy to fashion a story into a tidy, three-act narrative, with a little drama and a love interest thrown in. The result, often, is that both stories — the film’s plot, and the movement being depicted — get watered down (for a particularly disastrous example, see this year’s Stonewall).

Despite what its syrupy marketing campaign might communicate, this is blessedly not the case with Suffragette. There is no comic relief, or romance. There are no moments of grand triumph, swelling music, and hugs. Meryl Streep shows up, but only for about five minutes. In fact, the film doesn’t even cover the eventual passing of legislation in 1918 that allowed some women (not all) the vote in England.

Instead, director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan provide an account of the campaign for women’s equality that is inherently relatable to every fight for civil rights. The film provides audiences with a ground-level perspective on how difficult and infuriating it is to lobby for equal treatment even while knowing that your hope for change lies in leaders who don’t fully identify with your experience.

Suffragette introduces us to the battle for women’s voting rights in Britain through Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a wife and mother who’s spent her life working in an industrial laundry. Through encounters with a fellow laundress (Anne-Marie Duff) and a pharmacist (Helena Bonham Carter) active in the suffrage movement, Maud becomes heavily involved in the struggle, eventually losing her livelihood and family to the cause.

The film pulls no punches, from showing unnecessary police force at protests, to force-feeding hunger strikers in prison, to the differing levels of sacrifice between suffragettes at different class levels. As will probably come as no surprise, the working-class women like Maud are the ones who lose the most, while their wealthier sisters try to work within the system and experience constant disappointment from a government they thought would help them.

While the film extensively explores women’s roles, it doesn’t quite balance the equation in terms of men. Most of the film’s male characters are underwritten, particularly Maud’s husband Sonny, though actor Ben Wishaw’s performance adds a bit of much-needed texture to the character. And though Suffragette doesn’t quite go over-the-top in portraying the idealism of its characters, it comes close. Fortunately, the film opts to show the suffragettes’ feminism in gritty, realistic terms, rather than a shiny-faced, stiff-upper-lip positivity.

Though some critics have claimed that the film doesn’t do enough to show the effects of the suffrage movement, it seems appropriate that Suffragette ends while the fight is still going on. In the era of Black Lives Matter, battles for reproductive rights and immigration reform — causes with hoped-for but still undetermined outcomes — it’s reassuring to see a film that portrays historical characters in a similar situation. The women of Suffragette are confident in their eventual victory not because they know what will happen. They’re confident because they have to be — because for them, allowing defeat was not an option.