Suffragette ***½ (2015, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw, Meryl Streep) – Movie Review

It’s taken 100 years for a film about the Suffragette movement to reach the cinema screen. So, better make the most of it, now it’s here. We might have hoped for a biopic of the main woman, Emmeline Pankhurst, but here the movement’s leader is reduced to a star cameo in a rather camp but effective turn by Meryl Streep.

I know why they wanted Streep. She adds star power, she’s surviving movie royalty with a unique star career in her sixties, blazing a trail for other actresses, and a powerful spokesperson for equal pay in Hollywood. Fine.

But, anyway, she’s a side issue. The main issue is the rather hapless (initially) 1912 Bethnal Green laundry worker Maud Watts, played very well indeed by Carey Mulligan, who even manages to sound East Endery. She’s 30 playing 24, but that’s fine too because her character is exhausted and lined from cleaning laundry since she was seven.

Writer Abi Morgan wants to teach us quite a few historical facts as well as hit us hard over the head with women’s rights and civil rights issues, and show how the forces of darkness can be overcome by strong, determined individuals, who believe that silence equals death. Maud, of course, is poor and a woman, so she doesn’t stand a chance, unless…

That very nice-seeming man Ben Whishaw plays Maud’s husband Sonny, a severe, misguided individual. As Whishaw points out: ‘None of the men in the film, as you’d imagine, comes across very well.’

‘Only one man is supportive of the cause and sees that these women are not hysterical or mad, but passionate and engaged and extraordinarily brave.’

Mulligan is very good in a gift of a part, but Whishaw has his work cut out. His character is demonised as the representative of uncaring men. ‘It was difficult because that character does something in the film that sounds so cruel and weak. I tried to understand what might have led him to make that decision – to understand a man of that class of that period.’

Other demon men include Brendan Gleeson’s dogged Inspector Arthur Steed, Geoff Bell’s abusive laundry boss Norman Taylor, Adrian Schiller’s duplicitous politician David Lloyd George and Samuel West’s appalling Benedict Haughton. All of them are good in difficult roles for actors to humanise.

Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, has no difficulty at all, perfectly cast in a role that suits her like a suede glove of the middle-aged feminist who befriends Maud. She’s very credible as Edith Ellyn, an eager-beaver pharmacist cooking up home-made bombs! And Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff both make an extremely strong impression as sympathetic, suffering Suffragettes Alice Haughton and Violet Miller, a tough-talking woman also working the laundry.

Director Sarah Gavron keeps the story moving swiftly, smoothly and satisfyingly along. You somehow expect this is going to be an epic of maybe two and a half hours or so, but it’s all over in just 106 minutes. We could take more or the story, quite a lot more. As it is, it kind of fizzles out, with Maud’s story feeling incomplete and the climactic event of the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press) who throws herself under the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913 kind of thrown away. Maybe it’s her story the film-makers should have told. That’s two more movies, then, her story and Pankhurst’s.

The movie looks very good, and has a vibrant period feel, though when we get real footage at the end, the real thing looks kind of different – bigger, bustlier. Though short of the advertised masterpiece, it’s a powerful, compelling film, with some still shocking elements in its still-relevant story.

It’s not really a film festival film, but it has the honour of opening the 2015 BFI London Film Festival and it’s on release in the UK on 12 October.

Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, and her daughter Laura have cameo roles.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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