Suffragette

Sarah Gavron (2015)

The heroine of Suffragette, set in London in the years 1912 and 1913, is a young working-class woman called Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan).  (Like most of the film’s characters, she’s a fictional creation that’s presumably meant to be typical.)  Maud was born in the Glasshouse Laundry in Bethnal Green and has worked there since she was seven years old.  By 1912, she’s risen to a relatively senior position among the female workers in the laundry although she’s paid less than her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), whose job there isn’t such a responsible one.  One of Maud’s co-workers, Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff), is already a suffragette.  Maud admires Violet’s determination, in the face of suspicious derision from other workers, male and female, and victimisation by the vicious laundry overseer Norman Taylor (Geoff Bell).  Maud’s curiosity is piqued further when she takes her infant son George (Adam Michael Dodd) for an appointment with Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), who has a medical practice in the room behind the pharmacy run by her husband (Finbar Lynch):  a photograph of Emmeline Pankhurst and other suffragist images adorn the walls of Edith’s surgery.   Violet Miller is somehow chosen to be interviewed by a parliamentary select committee, chaired by David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller), and Maud accompanies her to Westminster for the occasion.  Violet arrives there with a horribly bruised face – the result, we assume, of male domestic violence.  Alice Haughton (Romola Garai), the middle-class woman who has arranged Violet’s appearance before the committee, decides that, with a black eye, she can’t appear.  Alice asks Maud to read out Violet’s statement on her behalf.  Maud reluctantly agrees; as she explains her presence and prepares to read, Lloyd George asks Maud to talk instead about herself.   After describing her circumstances to the committee, she is asked ‘What would the vote mean to you?’   Maud’s reply is that she doesn’t know:  she’s never thought about it, she says, because she’s assumed she’ll never have the vote.

In the course of Suffragette, Maud becomes a militant member of the female suffrage movement but you never do get a clear idea of what the vote would mean to her personally.  I don’t think Sarah Gavron, who directed this dull, gloomy film, and Abi Morgan, who wrote the screenplay, are interested in that kind of detail.  Like The Iron Lady, also written by Morgan, the script is all over the place; unlike The Iron Lady, the subject isn’t controversial.  The audience for the earlier film was divided in its views about Margaret Thatcher (and, often as a consequence of those views, about whether Morgan and Phyllida Lloyd were being too hard or too soft on the leading lady).  Gavron and Morgan can rest assured that few people who watch Suffragette will think giving women the vote was a bad move – and that the majority will accept that the suffragettes’ ends justified their means.  The film-makers seem to think that, because they’re honouring a cause that was right, they can do no wrong.  Their self-righteousness is probably increased by their focus on working-class suffragettes but – as either a muddle-headed or a disingenuous means of upping the quantum of misery – they blur the condition of female disenfranchisement and the living conditions more generally of working women in 1912.  You could be forgiven for thinking, on the strength of this film, that the members of the British votes-for-women campaign were named not because of an interest in suffrage but because of their suff’ring – yet a good deal of the hardship experienced by Maud, Violet and others is the result less of being denied the vote than of socio-economic circumstances.  (And Gavron and Morgan surely can’t be so simple-minded as to think that getting the vote was per se a passport to better lives for poorer women.)  At the same time, Suffragette isn’t bothered to explain how Maud, once she’s left her job at the laundry, not only survives economically but adds to her wardrobe.  It’s remarkable too that, although she’s been in part-time work since she was seven and full-time work since she was twelve, Maud seems to be effortlessly literate.

The early scenes of Maud’s home life are the best thing in Suffragette.  Carey Mulligan suggests Maud’s loving feelings for her husband; Ben Whishaw gets across, with characteristic tact and sensitivity, Sonny’s twitchiness about Maud’s increasing suffragette activities.  We see how this diffident young man, whose sense of security and self-esteem depend on his family, feels ashamed and threatened when the other male workers jeer at Violet Miller and Maud.  Sonny’s anxiety is given an added poignancy when we learn that Norman Taylor has, for years, been sexually exploiting girls on the laundry workforce, including Maud:  Sonny may well not be George’s biological father.  It’s therefore a pity, though hardly a surprise, that Sonny is, in due course, turned into just another male baddie.  There’s a scene in which, after he and Maud have separated, she goes back home for George’s birthday only to find that Sonny has decided this would be the ideal occasion to have the little boy taken away by his adoptive-parents-to-be.  This is the most egregious example of the film’s penchant for crude melodrama (although Adam Michael Dodd makes the child’s distress affectingly real).  Another instance of Abi Morgan’s facile compression of issues into a personal relationship formula comes with the revelation that Alice Haughton is married to a staid member of parliament – although, as played by Samuel West, Benedict Haughton MP is too pusillanimous to register as autocratic.  (West’s characterisation is hard to distinguish from his portrait of an uncomfortable politico in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on television earlier this year.)

Once Maud becomes politically engaged, the film gets more generic and Sarah Gavron shows little talent for making the militant activities of the suffragettes or their maltreatment by the police and prison authorities seem anything more than required elements of this kind of screen story.  Suffragette is far from static to watch yet the camera movement feels random and the cutting often seems too rapid.  It’s as if Gavron feels she can prove herself equal to the task of making the movie by keeping it moving; but with no clear rationale for the visual hyperactivity, the narrative is dramatically undifferentiated.  As Maud, Carey Mulligan is hugely skilful and likeable but I felt she was wrong for the part.   (It’s so poorly conceived that perhaps no one would have been right but Sally Hawkins might have been more successful.)  It’s not the effort Mulligan has to make to keep her Cockney accent going that’s the problem – it is an effort but she manages it well.  She has a fine moment early on when Maud pauses as she leaves Edith Ellyn’s surgery; Maud wants more of what she’s seen and heard there about women’s suffrage but Mulligan indicates that, at this stage, she hardly knows why.  This moment isn’t typical, though.  Mulligan conveys from the start a too reflective intelligence – she needs to be more of a tabula rasa.  As a result, Maud’s conversion doesn’t have much dramatic impact; you never feel that she’s been seized and transformed by the suffragette cause.

Helena Bonham Carter has the right idea in throwing away most of the lines Edith is given to speak but the effect is inadvertently amusing:  Bonham Carter seems to think if she underplays enough we won’t notice she’s there.  She’s too distinctive and too naturally witty a presence to disappear.   Anne-Marie Duff plays Violet Miller with a good, harsh humour and her leanness gives the character a physical believability.   Brendan Gleeson is Steed, an Irish detective experienced in dealing with the Fenian menace and recruited by Scotland Yard to handle the female emancipation one.  Gleeson does a very intelligent job – his underplaying works, at least for as long as he doesn’t have too much to say.  He’s inevitably less effective once he has to expound the repressive rhetoric Abi Morgan puts in Steed’s mouth.  (Gleeson also has to suffer in silence when Maud asks Steed, ‘What you gonna do?  Lock us all up?  We’re in every home – we’re half the human race!’  The Steed we saw earlier in the film would surely reply that far from every woman shares Maud’s views but now he’s struck dumb by the irresistibility of her argument.)  There’ve been grumblings that the trailer for Suffragette promised more of Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst than we get.  Be that as it may (she’s on screen for about twenty seconds of the two-and-a-half-minute trailer and for barely five minutes of the 106-minute film), I think her casting was a mistake.   I understand why the film-makers wanted a big-name actress who has consistently spoken out for gender equality in cinema; I can see why Streep was attracted to the project and she briefly gives this often dreary film a jolt of histrionic life.  But her appearance is unsuccessful for two reasons.  First, having an acting legend in the role reduces the impact of the excitement of Mrs Pankhurst’s supporters when she speaks to them from the balcony of a London house.  Their electrified reaction would mean more if the woman delivering the speech wasn’t so obviously charismatic – wasn’t Meryl Streep.  Second, the agitated timbre of Streep’s voice recalls her delivery of early House of Commons speeches in The Iron Lady – before Margaret Thatcher had had lessons to tone down the vocal shrillness.  The unfortunate implication of this association is that Mrs Pankhurst paved the way for Mrs Thatcher.

The climax to the film is the ‘Suffragette Derby’.  Emily Wilding Davison’s purposes and actions on Derby Day 1913 continue to be debated a hundred years later.  To that extent, Gavron and Morgan can’t easily be accused of messing with history yet this episode in the film is still a mess.  It’s implied that the invented Maud and the real Emily Davison were working together at Epsom and were thwarted in an attempt to demonstrate in some way while the Derby runners and their connections, including King George V, were in the paddock.  Davison’s eventual dart through the running rails and onto the course, as the field rounds Tattenham Corner, is presented as a piece of crazy improvisation. (It should be said that Natalie Press, who plays Davison, is impressive:  her fervid, unaccountable quality rather makes you wonder why she isn’t the main character in the story.)  Gavron and Morgan, having qualified the nature of Davison’s political act, then make a very big deal of her funeral, end the live action, and put on the screen a list of dates when women were enfranchised in different countries of the world.  This postscript, embarrassing in its classroom stuffiness, also verges on the counterproductive:  instructing us that, for example, women in New Zealand had the vote two decades before the years in which Suffragette is set rather undercuts the idea the film has seemed to promote:  that the British suffragettes changed the world.  It’s striking too that Gavron and Morgan choose to end their story in June 1913, safely ahead of August 1914 (and as if it was the Suffragette Derby that made the difference in the struggle for the vote).   It’s arguable, of course, to what extent World War I, and the jobs that British women did on the home front, accelerated the passing of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 and subsequent legislation.  But the film-makers are having it both ways in giving the audience a closing history lesson that doesn’t acknowledge the particular significance of the Great War years in bringing about new female roles and less benighted perceptions of women’s rights and capabilities.

19 October 2015