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Votes for Women is the cry in this bad movie made about an important issue |
Director: Sarah Gavron
Cast: Carey Mulligan (Maud Watts), Helena Bonham Carter
(Edith Ellyn), Anne-Marie Duff (Violet Miller), Romola Garai (Alice Haughton),
Ben Whishaw (Sonny Watts), Brendan Gleeson (Inspector Steed), Samuel West
(Benedict Haughton), Meryl Streep (Emmeline Pankhurst), Adrian Schiller (David
Lloyd George), Geoff Bell (Norman Taylo r), Finbar Lynch (Hugh Ellyn)
Votes for Women was a historic movement that looked to
settle a gross injustice. It’s a major issue brimming with importance: and Lord
doesn’t Suffragette know it. In fact,
Suffragette is practically a textbook
example of an important issue being turned into a bad film. Clunky, weighed
down with its own bombast and stuffed to the gills with clichés, Suffragette fails to move and makes its vital political points seem leaden and dull.
Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) is a young washerwoman, who one
day finds herself accidentally swept up in a suffragette protest. Before she
knows it, her friend Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) has inveigled her to give
testimony at a parliamentary hearing, where she meets Edith Ellynn (Helena
Bonham Carter). Ellyn believes that peaceful struggle will lead nowhere and
violent action is the only way to get what they want. As the violence
escalates, Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) is tasked to infiltrate and bring
down the suffragette movement.
It should be more interesting. But Suffragette is a sluggish “issue drama” whose every frame drips
with the self-importance of people who feel they aren’t just making a film,
they’re making a “statement”. This feeling infects everything, from the
heavy-handed dialogue (too many scenes feel like speechifying rather than
dialogue) to the obvious characterisations. Nothing in the film ever really rings true, and nothing ever really grips. On top of that sloppily written, it doesn't really have any dramatic structure and events eventually peter out.
Mulligan’s saintly character – as a kind of suffragette
every woman – goes through everything from abuse from her boss, to losing her
home and children, to being force-fed in prison. It strains credulity –
particularly as she’s playing some fictional archetype. The truly noble
suffragettes are all working-class and put-upon, while Romola Garai’s
upper-class wife quickly turns her back on the cause when things get risky. Bar
Brendan Gleeson’s humane Inspector and Finbar Lynch’s decent husband (and even
he performs an act of betrayal), every single man in this is a bastard – a
paternalistic liar, a wife-beater, a bullying husband or an abusive boss. It’s
just too bloody much. The film seems not to trust its audience to understand
the story unless it’s acted out by a series of caricatures, as if we can’t
appreciate that gender equality is a good thing in itself without a saintly
sad-faced girl being mistreated by a series of misogynist ogres.
Mulligan is rather
good but her angry denunciations and points during her scenes with
Gleeson just sound like she’s mouthing research from the writer. The end result
is, despite all the things Maud goes through, you just don’t really care about
her. She feels like an empty character. Even the end of the film doesn’t
revolve around her: Emily Davison is reintroduced just in time for the
conclusion at the Derby. Why not just make a film about Davison? Why did they
feel the need to place this uninteresting fictional character at the heart of
it? Did they just feel it had to be a working class hero?
Because the script tries to cover every single element of
the suffragette movement, it often feels like a box-ticking exercise. Meryl
Streep gets the best tick, popping up to deliver a single speech as Emmaline
Pankhurst before disappearing. But the collection of events thrown together
don’t convince. Helena Bonham Carter does her very best to make Edith’s
radicalism seem compelling and thought-through, but even that seems like a tack-on
rather than something that really teaches us about any of the characters. Moral
questions around violence and protest are almost completely ignored, and the
film doesn’t really distinguish between those (essentially) willing to kill and
those who wanted to protest within the law.
On top of its mediocre writing, the film is also only
competently directed – its pace is often way off and sluggish, and most of the
scenes are shot with an unimaginative televisual eye, mixed with standard
“throw you into the action” shots for major protests. It all contributes to the
entire venture not coming to life at all. For such a huge issue, and for all
the importance it’s being treated with here, it just seems lifeless and rather
dull.
This is despite the decent acting (Anne-Marie Duff is
excellent, as are most of the rest of the principals) and the efforts of all
involved. But it's just not engaging. The most moving and gasp-inducing moment is the end credits roll of dates where countries gave women the vote (1970 for Switzerland!) - but when the most moving thing you see in the film could have cut and pasted from a Wikipedia page you are in trouble.
But what can you say about a drama about women’s rights where the
male Inspector comes out as the most interesting and nuanced character? That
just doesn’t feel right. And that’s the problem with Suffragette. Nothing feels right. Everything feels off. The history
doesn’t ring true, the characterisations feel forced, the events seem
predictable and clichéd. There’s nothing to really get you impassioned here –
other than with frustration about a bad movie fudging an important subject.
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