I feared Suffragette would be a Meryl Streep vehicle with an uncomfortable “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” mantra.
The suffragette movement wasn’t exactly a bastion of intersectional feminism, and as much as I love good old Meryl, I was bracing myself for a film about upper-class white women.
The film is still about white British women, of course, but mostly poor working-class ones. Streep’s portrayal of Emmeline Pankhurst is just a brief side note in the story of Maud Watts, a working class mother and laundress played with quiet intensity by Carey Mulligan.
Suffragette thankfully does not parcel off its protagonist into a convenient romance. It allows her to be a loving mother and firebrand rebel, a caring friend and a terrorist who blows up buildings.
The women are the centre of the film, as they should be. Mulligan’s character is at times a stand-in for the audience—a wide-eyed newcomer to suffragette culture. A laundry worker since childhood, she has a past of sexual abuse at the hands of her employer and a huge burn scar on her arm. I liked that the burn scar was never acknowledged outright—the camera observes impassively and allows the audience to figure out the rest.
Helena Bonham Carter plays a fearless doctor, Anne-Marie Duff plays a rabble-rouser with an abusive husband, and Natalie Press plays real-life suffragette Emily Davidson with a hint of fanaticism that could have been better emphasized. The women bond as “foot soldiers” for the movement. They endure police brutality, hunger strikes in prison, and force-feeding together, which is pretty much the most badass way I can think of for friendships to form.
In comparison to parts of the movie depicting the group’s hardships, the scene of Meryl Streep’s beatific Emmeline Pankhurst standing on a balcony preaching to her disciples seems almost silly. The important part of that scene is the cutaway to Maud standing on the ground entranced. In that moment she transforms from complacent housewife to militant anarchist.
Suffragette questions the morals and methods of its heroines, but not as insightfully as I would have liked. In the end, violence and martyrdom still win the day. The true story of the Pankhursts is one of bitter infighting—I can’t expect one film to capture all that tension, but this one at times felt like an over-simplified version of a far more complex story.
At one point Maud saves a young girl from sexual abuse at the hands of a laundry foreman in a way so convenient it jolted me out of the gritty realism of the rest of the film. Furthermore, on a narrative level the conclusion of Suffragette fails to stick the landing. Without giving away too much, I’ll say the fate of one character does not garner the emotional impact it should.
I can’t think of another film that actually tackles the suffragette movement so blatantly, and that alone is reason enough to see this one. I only wish it had been a little more daring and radical, like its heroines.
