Critics reviews

While it's gratifying to see that a film about this important subject was written and directed by women, neither director Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane) nor screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Invisible Woman) demonstrates any willingness to grapple with history's messy complexities. This is an emphatically rah-rah picture, expending most of its energy on conveying how hard life was at the time for those lacking a Y chromosome. No viewer's preconceptions will be challenged.

Some will criticize the director's choice to recount a collective struggle through just one individual, but Mulligan's performance, coupled with a solid script by Abi Morgan, shows us just how much is at stake when a woman decides to wage war.

This period drama shows how awful it was to be a working-class woman at that time, particularly in its vivid, nightmarish scenes of the industrial laundry where the heroine works: she and the other women clock long hours under extremely unsafe conditions and weather all kinds of abuse from their male employers. Scenes dramatizing the political organizing and protests are less effective, bogged down by pedantic dialogue and historical generalizations.

Despite several good performances, it makes no lasting impression. A film about bravery and revolution should be at least a little bit dangerous in my view. The fleeting presence of Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst only solidifies the impression of watching well known actors feeling courageous while wiping off their makeup and cashing their pay cheques.

[Maud's] groundlessness is unintentionally echoed in Gavron's direction, which has the power to mangle even the simplest moments through bizarre framing, extremely shaky handheld camera, and excessive cutting, clashing techniques that are often employed simultaneously. It's too intentional to be called sloppy, yet too conventional to be called innovative or experimental.

Suffragette ends with a roll of dates showing when various nations gave women the vote. In America, all women were enfranchised in 1920, but state laws and intimidation kept black women out of the voting booth in many areas until decades later. It's a glaring omission, and, again, shows an unwillingness to live in the rich complexity of reality.

What "Suffragette" is about is so substantial, so serious, and, at times, so surprising, that the movie's lack of vision (both literal and metaphorical), its failures of imagination, its built-in inhibitions and shortcuts, are all the more unfortunate. They keep a decent and worthy, amiable and unchallenging film short of the greatness of the subject itself.

Sometimes, timeliness can be a crutch. Sarah Gavron's Suffragette comes during a time of renewed fervor and immediacy for feminism and women's rights, and its real-world echoes are right there with us as we watch the film. But while it may have the courage of its convictions, the movie itself often lacks depth and dimension. It feels like a lot of good, urgent ideas in search of a unifying whole.

Of course, just the fact that Suffragette explores an important and underreported topic isn't enough to make it worth watching. What does is how its episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.

The problem with this movie, and with many movies like it, is a desperation to make it known that the people we're watching are great, they are heroes and they changed the world as we know it.

Mulligan is on seriously good form here, showing Maud's gradual transformation from bystander to activist with riveting emotional precision. As Morgan's script, via the forces of law and order, gradually strip away the reasons for Maud to quieten down and fall back into line, her resolve deepens and nerve soars through the roof.

Suffragette, with its relentlessly message-driven narrative, seems schematic and a little over-manufactured in its dedication to capturing the cause... [But] gifted with an extraordinary performance from Carey Mulligan, the film is kept aloft by her delicate, stripped-down playing of Maud's journey from hesitant sympathiser to blazingly angry outlaw.