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FILM REVIEW

Missing in Action: the Politically-Engaged New Woman.
Suffragette (film), dir. Sarah Gavron. Ruby Films, 2015.

Reviewed by Sharon Bickle.

I am a self-confessed tragic when it comes to literary adaptions and period films: I will go and see anything with a tenuous connection to the nineteenth century. I try and keep my expectations low and remind myself that—for the most part—I am not the audience for these films, and that they are about entertainment not scholarship. Sometimes, however, with the best will in the world I do get my hopes up, and Suffragette was one of those films.

If you, like me, followed the trailers for Suffragette throughout 2015, I’m sure you know what I mean. Carey Mulligan secured her place as one of my favourite actors with her portrayal of Bathsheba Everdene in the compulsively-watchable Far From the Madding Crowd mid-year (so much better than 2014’s rather turgid Madame Bovary with Mia Wasikowska). For once it seemed like women were going to be allowed to run the show and carry the story, with director Sarah Gavron casting Meryl Streep and Helena Bonham Carter as seat-filling leads rather than trying to mediate the story through a celebrity male voice. It looked spectacular, it had a dream cast and a story that really needs to be told: I wasn’t waiting for Santa this year so much as I was waiting for Suffragette.

It was perhaps inevitable that the film did not live up to such high expectations. In terms of the setting, the costumes, and way it is filmed: it is beautiful. The long dresses and broad-brimmed hats seamlessly bring to life archival pictures and film footage of the suffrage marches, and Meryl Streep’s Mrs Pankhurst might have stepped straight out of the famous photograph of her arrest. The street and laundry scenes are simple and effective and, while gritty, lack Dickensian caricature. The scenes in prison and at Epsom racecourse are less satisfying but mostly because they are simply too brief.

The film is constructed about a working-class factory woman and mother, Maud Watts (Mulligan) who is gradually drawn into the suffrage movement. Initially curious, she attends a hearing at which she is unexpectedly called to give testimony to Lloyd George himself, and this leads her on to rallies, to prison, window breaking and other acts of militancy. Mulligan’s performance is very good. She is the heart of the film and demonstrates the sacrifice made by the suffragettes for the cause. She loses her charming little family circle, her loving but convention-bound husband (Ben Whishaw) and son (Adam Michael Dodd), her home, her job, is force-fed in prison, and ultimately witnesses the death of her friend, Emily.

Maud has a few strong political lines but her role is gimlet-eyed newbie, there to be educated. The film raises important questions about class and privilege, but this is where, for me, the film fails. When Maud is asked by Lloyd George what she would do with the franchise, she replies that she has never really thought about it. This is entirely consistent with her working-class character, but it’s a gap that is never sufficiently filled by the film. The women’s many sufferings for the cause are clear, but why they are willing to pay this price—the political heart of the film—is missing.  Streep’s Mrs Pankhurst is little more than a cameo. She is on screen only long enough for a few well-worn slogans: the rallying cry, “I would rather be a rebel than a slave” and, to Maud at a car window, “Never surrender. Never give up the fight.” Helena Bonham Carter’s Edith Ellyn is readily identifiable as the New Woman. Ellyn is a doctor who covertly treats patients from the back room of her husband’s pharmacy. There is an implied affirmation of the empowered woman in Maud's removal of the young Maggie from sexual exploitation at the laundry but it is too vague a link with suffrage itself. Between them, it is the Mrs Pankhurst/Ellyn characters who could have—in my view, should have—brought several decades of politically-engaged New Woman thought to the film. They don’t, and with the exception of a few sketchy details, the New Woman herself goes missing in action in this film.  

Another disappointing aspect of the film is the treatment of Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press). The climax of the film is Davison’s death, and its second half becomes a kind of coy biopic: coy because Emily’s full identity is not revealed until after her death. Indeed, up until they leave for Epsom, Emily is a very minor character. The Davison plot raises real questions for me about the intended audience of the film: either it is aimed at a knowing viewer, in which case the film’s ending is as predictable as Titanic; or it is not, which rather begs the question of who is the intended audience? Holding back Davison’s name suggests an intent to create suspense—as if events themselves aren’t immediately familiar—yet with the revelation of her name, we are meant to recognise her moment in history, and the film sells short the affect of Davison’s martyrdom on the movement, not even showing its final success. The audience is left betwixt and between: some historical knowledge is essential to getting the message, just not too much.

In spite of its shortcomings, this is an important film. Significant historical female figures remain underrepresented in popular culture, and where they do appear they are seldom given a central role, nor are they allowed to be presented by women for women. The centenary of women’s suffrage in my own country, Australia, has passed with only very muted recognition. It is to be hoped that the centenary of women’s suffrage in Britain will be a more high-profile affair, and that Suffragette is merely the start of better things to come.

Sharon Bickle is a lecturer in Literature at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia and a co-editor of The Latchkey. Her research focuses on late-Victorian women writers, particularly the collaborative partnership of “Michael Field.”.