This rather safe, solid drama recalls the Suffragette struggle of early 1900s England, through the story of one woman, the laundry girl, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and how her decision to join the struggle proves to have serious consequences in her personal life.
Ben Whishaw plays her husband Sonny, who works with her at the laundry on Bethnal Green. Fundamentally a decent man, he can tolerate his wife Maud getting ideas about justice and so on but only up to a point. Because she is threatening their livelihood by her new-found activism, Sonny makes two radical decisions which fracture the small family unit for good. The first of these decisions is to throw her and her belongings out of their tiny dwelling. To tell the second would be to spoil, but suffice to say that Suffragette is a tear-jerker.
It is also a film that dutifully, if ploddingly charts the early ferment, as Maud begins to rebel against the laundry overseer, Norman Taylor (Geoff Bell), played as a stage baddie straight out of Dickens. In a key scene, Maud reluctantly stands in for a fellow worker to make the case for women’s rights to a committee chaired by David Lloyd George. The lot of women such as Maud was vastly different from that of British women who were property-owners. Such women had been enfranchised to vote in local elections since 1894. Unused to any form of public speaking, Maud nevertheless summons her courage to paint a picture of unhealthy and dangerous conditions at the laundry.
She duly impresses Lloyd George and his committee, but there is quite a ways yet in the Suffragette struggle. New tactics include letter bombs and the bombing of a government minister’s mansion. The turning point is the fateful moment when Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press) throws herself under the king’s horse at Epsom on Derby Day in 1913.
Davison’s funeral is attended by thousands and the tide turns. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act enfranchised women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications. In 1928, the Equal Franchise Act gave the vote to all women over the age of 21.
Fresh from playing a rock chick, Meryl Streep makes a brief cameo or two as Emmeline Pankhurst, speaking, incidentally, with an accent she clearly learned from the actress who used to voice the wise old owl in The Animals of Farthing Wood. It’s a little bit jarring, all these Meryl incarnations, but happily it’s just a cameo. Brendan Gleeson is impressive as Inspector Arthur Steed who suffers qualms of conscience about the force feeding of female prisoners like Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of Emmeline.
There is nothing novel here at all in terms of film-making – just in case you assumed some daring flourishes - and it is strictly a by-the-numbers drama, no more exciting than a reliable Dickens TV dramatisation. If you want something cosy, then by all means go see it. Suffragette opens Monday next, October 12.
Paddy Kehoe
