I’m not 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 because I always try to see every movie that could receive a nomination for a Best Six Academy Award. It’s unlikely that this film will receive any recognition, but it generated some buzz 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. However, unfortunately, it was very predictable (which I had expected) and not nearly as riveting as it could have been (also something I had 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 only one scene and appears on screen for less than two minutes.

Suffragette tells the true story of a group of women in 1912 London who, inspired by Emmeline Pankhurst, risk everything in their attempt to gain the right to vote for women. 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, I don’t think everyone shared my thoughts. 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. 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. However, for whatever reason, as I continued to evaluate this film while watching it, I kept arriving at the same conclusion. 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. I always prefer movies based on true stories that don’t distort the facts for the sake of dramatic license. And 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 earn just 13 shillings per hour, compared to their male counterparts, who earn 19 shillings. 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; however, there is nothing Maud or her fellow workers can do to improve their situation. They have no rights. It’s not just that they have no rights at work. They have no rights at home either. The husbands control those rights. This authentically hits home with at least one of the main characters in this movie.

The character development of these characters, particularly with Maud, is excellent. Although we are unaware of the exact length from the start of the movie until its end, we can safely assume it is a good number of months, and possibly even a year. At the beginning of the film, Maud is a quiet woman. She doesn’t have the happiest life overall due to the demanding nature of her job. Still, she does seem content for the few hours she gets to spend each day with her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw – Spectre, The Danish Girl), and particularly with her son, George (Adam Michael Dodd). But when she sees co-workers Edith (Helen Brohm Carter – The King’s Speech, Les Misérables) and Violet (Anne-Marie Duff – The Last Station, Notes on a Scandal) fight for all women on her behalf with no success, she becomes involved with the cause, slowly at first and then much more passionately. Maud, Edith, and Violet certainly feel like real characters. Nothing that they did was glamorous, and a lot of what they did received more backlash than approval, even from other women. The women paid for crimes they committed and even paid for crimes that they did not commit. Still, they were devoted to their cause, and it was because of these three and other women like them, women in London gained the right to vote. Their efforts inspired women in different countries to fight for the right to vote.

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 scene in this movie that put the suffragette movement in the international spotlight was. It’s just that in a 1-hour and 45-minute film 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 a much greater impact on me than it did.

The movie’s positives included the acting, character development, 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
79%

C

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