I’m not entirely sure how Sarah Gavron’s (Village At The End Of The World, Brick Lane) Suffragette could have been a film that I truly enjoyed. I’m not the biggest fan of British historical dramas, and this was not a movie I went to see for enjoyment. It was a film I went to see just because I always try to see every movie that potentially could receive a nomination for a Best Six Academy Award. I think it’s unlikely that this film will get any recognition, but there was some buzz surrounding it before its release. In any regard, I knew this would be a movie I would end up seeing. Is it a bad movie? Not at all. It’s actually a very educational movie that has some above-average acting performances. But, unfortunately, it was very predictable (which I expected) and not nearly as riveting as it probably could have been (also something that I expected). Also, if you are hoping to experience the annual Meryl Streep (Doubt, The Devil Wears Prada) Oscar nomination, this isn’t it. She has all of one scene and is on the screen for less than two minutes.
Suffragette tells the true story of a group of women in 1912 London who, after being inspired by Streep’s Emmeline Pankhurst, risk everything in an attempt to get women the right to vote. The story is easy to follow, and the characters are identifiable. But with all that these women risked and all that was done to them, I felt remarkably unmoved by this picture. With that said, not everyone felt the same way that I did. Afterward, I heard someone next to me say, “Wow,” to the person she was with. Perhaps I wasn’t invested enough? Maybe I watch too many movies? Possibly my belief that the film would be nothing more than a boring historical drama before even sitting down ruined any chance I might have had of enjoying it. But for whatever reason, as I kept evaluating this film as I watched it, I kept coming up with the same thing. C+. It was a slightly above-average movie. It will not finish on many end-of-year top ten lists, and it certainly won’t end up on mine. But it certainly is worth watching. And I always like to give movies based on true stories that don’t distort the facts for the benefit of the doubt. And I think that is what Suffragette did here.
Carey Mulligan (An Education, Drive) is fantastic as Maud, a 24-year-old wife and mother of a young son who works under hellacious conditions as a launderer. We learn that women make just 13 shillings per hour compared to their male counterparts, who earn 19. Women also work a third as many hours per week. Her boss is lewd and has a male early 20th century, I-can-do-anything complex. The conditions of the laundromat are hot and hostile while the hours are long and the pay is poor, but there is nothing these Maud or her fellow workers can do to improve their conditions. They have no rights. It’s not just that they have no rights at work. They have no rights at home either. The husband control those rights. This authentically hits home with at least one of the main characters in this movie.
Unfortunately, there were only a couple of moments of this film that made me feel anything. Without giving anything away, one of those was a scene between Maud and George. The other was the scene in this movie that put the suffragette movement in the international spotlight. It’s just that in a 1 hour and 45-minute movie about the gut-wrenching (literally at times) of women trying to gain the right to vote, the audience should feel more. When things went wrong, we should have felt worse than we did. When there were victories along the way (however small), we should have rejoiced more than we did. Unfortunately, the scenes that felt poignant were more of an exception than the rule. The point here is that this movie had the potential to have much more of an impact on me than it did.
The movie’s positives were the acting, the character development, the sets, and, of course, the true story. The negatives were the directing, the screenplay to an extent, and the lack of emotion involved with what could have been a moving feature film.
Plot 9/10
Character Development 8.5/10
Character Chemistry 7.5/10
Acting 8.5/10
Screenplay 7.5/10
Directing 5/10
Cinematography 8.5/10
Sound 7.5/10
Hook and Reel 7/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
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