Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette is a film that’s dedicated. It dramatizes the latter stages of the struggle of British women for the right to vote, and it portrays not only events and people but also the context of the suffrage struggle. In this film’s 1912, most British women seem opposed to the notion of women voting, and patriarchy is brutally conservative when challenged by women seeking equal rights. And Suffragette shows why women needed the right to vote in that historical moment.
But just as the cinematography here is desaturated and monochromatic, so are the story and characters oddly bland. Carey Mulligan, as Maud, hits all the right notes in the film’s leading role, just as the rest of the cast does, but Gavron ultimately delivers a film that keeps us from involvement in the characters and their actions. Even in the climax toward the film’s end, we find ourselves distanced and observing rather than feeling what is happening, perhaps because this climax involves a character we hardly know.
For all Suffragette’s dedication to its cause and effort to evoke the context of the struggle for women’s right to vote, this film succeeds more in educating us about history than in inspiring us to its cause. As education, it’s remarkably effective, but as cinema, it doesn’t inspire.
