Suffragette (Film Review)
Feb. 11th, 2016 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI've seen a review of this movie titled "Putting the 'suffer' back in 'suffrage', and there's truth in this, though I wouldn't necessarily see this as a negative, not least because what visual depictions of the fight for the female right to vote I've seen tended to consist of the occasional upper class suffragette in someone else's family narrative, and both scriptwriter Abi Morgan's focus on working class women and just how badly their situation was feels fresh and very welcome. Otoh I do have some criticism of my own, but it's about other issues.
The movie's main character, Maude Watts, and the two most fleshed out supporting characters, her friends Violet and Edith, are, or so a quick check via google assures me, all fictional; the very much historic Emily, by contrast, hardly gets anything character-establishing to do until the climactic scene of the movie when she becomes a martyr, and that is a problem. To be honest, I had expected Maude to ahistorically become the one to die in that scene, both because the movie seemed to build up to it with its "Passion of St. Maude" structure (I don't mean this in a snide way, but as an honest observation - Maude goes through hardship after hardship and comes out stronger much in the way of a morality play of old, or a saint's story) and because Emily was such an nonentity before. Also because no review I had read before had given more the impression that Maude would survive the movie.
Which she does. Maude is played by Carey Mulligan (Violet: Anne-Marie Duff; Edith: Helena Bonham-Carter), who does a great job showing Maude's transformation from "keeping my head down to get by" to activist unbroken by horrendous losses. Maude basically goes through everything any suffragette ever suffered (kicked out by husband, loss of child, loss of job, social ostracism by former circle, beaten by police, forcefed in prison), but none of this stuff is something that didn't happen to people at the time, and it's a good reminder that the struggle didn't just consist of carrying banners.
However, Abi Morgan had one basic narrative problem with the tight temporal focus she chose (on the years 1912/1913), and it is this: British women didn't get the vote then. As the final credits tell us, British women over 30 and of a certain income got it in 1918/19, and all British women didn't get it until 1928. (This really surprised me; I had assumed they had gotten the (unlimited) vote directly after World War I, as women did in Germany and Austria.). (For that matter, the credits tell us the first country where women got the right to vote was New Zealand in 1893.) (Why so far behind, Britain?) And the First World War and its fallout really was the deciding factor here, but this movie can't tackle it. Otoh the movie wants to provide some sense of triumph and achievement at the end after all the struggle and thus declares that the enormous publicity and considerable sympathy Emily's death on the racing track got turned the tide to achieving the right to vote, that this was the first event that alerted people on a global scale to the struggle for the female right to vote (with all due respect to the dead Emily, I don't think the women in Russia, who got the vote way before any Englishwoman did, ever heard about this). And while we're at historical distortions in order to achieve a smoother narrative, there is no mention at all of the fact that in 1912, about 40% of British men didn't have the right to vote, either; someone like Maude's husband Sonny (played by Ben Wishaw) who works in the same laundry she does, would not have had it. There was a minimum wealth qualification: men had to prove they were paying at least £10 rent a year or held £10 worth of land. After the war, it was felt that it would be unacceptable to continue to deny the vote to men who had just served in the trenches. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised all men over the age of 21. (It also gave the vote to women over 30 who were members of the local government register (or were married to a member), owned property, or were graduates voting in university constituencies. The rest of the women, as mentioned, didn't get the right to vote until 1928.)
This of course doesn't make the injustice towards women in 1912/13 any lesser, but you'd think someone (Sonny or the copper played by Brendan Gleeson who tries in vain to recruit Maude as a spy on the movement) would bring it up in an argument, yet no one does.
Emmeline Pankhurst, played by Meryl Streep, has only a cameo appearance in which she holds a speech, though she's constantly talked about both by the women and their police men who harrass them. She's basically a figure of inspiration, not a character in the movie. I've seen some criticism that this doesn't show Ms. Pankhurst ran the movement "as tight as a dictatorship", as a negative description goes, and that there's just one line mentioning the difference of opinion between Sylvia Pankhurst and her mother and sister (Christabel), but this movie never claimed to be a Pankhurst biopic, and to someone like Maude, Emmeline P would only have been someone she saw from afar and mostly heard about. Given that the way the movie tries to stay away from the usual "Great Historic Person Achieves Social Change Single Handedly" fallacy many narratives about activists involved in historic changes fall into, I think it's a justifyable narrative choice.
The only named politician on the government side of things is David Lloyd George, at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Presumably he gets the name check (and the character establishing scene early on in which at first he appears to listen to our heroine describe her awful work situation with understanding and sympathy and then lets her and everyone else down by reading out the PM's declaration that there was no cause for female suffrage) because it's his house that gets blown up later on, and Abi Morgan wanted to make sure that a) the audience knew who he was, and b) wanted to give them cause to think he had it coming (after letting our heroines establish the house is empty at the time of the bombing). (The copper later tells Maude that the housekeeper was unexpectedly on her way back to the house and would have gotten blown up if she'd arrived two minutes earlier.). So far, so scriptwise understandable, but it amuses me a bit that the actual Prime Minister at the time, Herbert Asquith, who was far more anti-female vote than DLG, doesn't get as much as a name call when one of the most prominent actresses of the movie, Helena Bonham Carter, is a direct descendant.
Speaking of whom: following the rule that when she is cast outside of her Burton formed Goth girl persona, she's excellent, I found her very good here as Edith the pharmacist who also has the sole consistently supporting husband of the movie characters.
Let's see, what else: the movie makes it clear that Maude's boss at the laundry has sexually preyed on her and many other women, and that he's now moving on to Violet's 14 years old daughter Maggie, without actual sex scenes or naked women. That all the workers are so used to this that it doesn't even occur to anyone, including Violet when she gets fired (for her political activities), to protest against this, is an additional gut wrenching circumstance. Maude finally (and satisfyingly) explodes at him, but only after being fired herself.
Emily's last words, reciting the movement's slogan "never surrender, never give up the fight" unfortunately can't help associating Galaxy Quest these days ("Never give up, never surrender!"), which makes me wonder whether the Galaxy Quest scriptwriters knew their suffragette history.
The movie's main character, Maude Watts, and the two most fleshed out supporting characters, her friends Violet and Edith, are, or so a quick check via google assures me, all fictional; the very much historic Emily, by contrast, hardly gets anything character-establishing to do until the climactic scene of the movie when she becomes a martyr, and that is a problem. To be honest, I had expected Maude to ahistorically become the one to die in that scene, both because the movie seemed to build up to it with its "Passion of St. Maude" structure (I don't mean this in a snide way, but as an honest observation - Maude goes through hardship after hardship and comes out stronger much in the way of a morality play of old, or a saint's story) and because Emily was such an nonentity before. Also because no review I had read before had given more the impression that Maude would survive the movie.
Which she does. Maude is played by Carey Mulligan (Violet: Anne-Marie Duff; Edith: Helena Bonham-Carter), who does a great job showing Maude's transformation from "keeping my head down to get by" to activist unbroken by horrendous losses. Maude basically goes through everything any suffragette ever suffered (kicked out by husband, loss of child, loss of job, social ostracism by former circle, beaten by police, forcefed in prison), but none of this stuff is something that didn't happen to people at the time, and it's a good reminder that the struggle didn't just consist of carrying banners.
However, Abi Morgan had one basic narrative problem with the tight temporal focus she chose (on the years 1912/1913), and it is this: British women didn't get the vote then. As the final credits tell us, British women over 30 and of a certain income got it in 1918/19, and all British women didn't get it until 1928. (This really surprised me; I had assumed they had gotten the (unlimited) vote directly after World War I, as women did in Germany and Austria.). (For that matter, the credits tell us the first country where women got the right to vote was New Zealand in 1893.) (Why so far behind, Britain?) And the First World War and its fallout really was the deciding factor here, but this movie can't tackle it. Otoh the movie wants to provide some sense of triumph and achievement at the end after all the struggle and thus declares that the enormous publicity and considerable sympathy Emily's death on the racing track got turned the tide to achieving the right to vote, that this was the first event that alerted people on a global scale to the struggle for the female right to vote (with all due respect to the dead Emily, I don't think the women in Russia, who got the vote way before any Englishwoman did, ever heard about this). And while we're at historical distortions in order to achieve a smoother narrative, there is no mention at all of the fact that in 1912, about 40% of British men didn't have the right to vote, either; someone like Maude's husband Sonny (played by Ben Wishaw) who works in the same laundry she does, would not have had it. There was a minimum wealth qualification: men had to prove they were paying at least £10 rent a year or held £10 worth of land. After the war, it was felt that it would be unacceptable to continue to deny the vote to men who had just served in the trenches. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised all men over the age of 21. (It also gave the vote to women over 30 who were members of the local government register (or were married to a member), owned property, or were graduates voting in university constituencies. The rest of the women, as mentioned, didn't get the right to vote until 1928.)
This of course doesn't make the injustice towards women in 1912/13 any lesser, but you'd think someone (Sonny or the copper played by Brendan Gleeson who tries in vain to recruit Maude as a spy on the movement) would bring it up in an argument, yet no one does.
Emmeline Pankhurst, played by Meryl Streep, has only a cameo appearance in which she holds a speech, though she's constantly talked about both by the women and their police men who harrass them. She's basically a figure of inspiration, not a character in the movie. I've seen some criticism that this doesn't show Ms. Pankhurst ran the movement "as tight as a dictatorship", as a negative description goes, and that there's just one line mentioning the difference of opinion between Sylvia Pankhurst and her mother and sister (Christabel), but this movie never claimed to be a Pankhurst biopic, and to someone like Maude, Emmeline P would only have been someone she saw from afar and mostly heard about. Given that the way the movie tries to stay away from the usual "Great Historic Person Achieves Social Change Single Handedly" fallacy many narratives about activists involved in historic changes fall into, I think it's a justifyable narrative choice.
The only named politician on the government side of things is David Lloyd George, at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Presumably he gets the name check (and the character establishing scene early on in which at first he appears to listen to our heroine describe her awful work situation with understanding and sympathy and then lets her and everyone else down by reading out the PM's declaration that there was no cause for female suffrage) because it's his house that gets blown up later on, and Abi Morgan wanted to make sure that a) the audience knew who he was, and b) wanted to give them cause to think he had it coming (after letting our heroines establish the house is empty at the time of the bombing). (The copper later tells Maude that the housekeeper was unexpectedly on her way back to the house and would have gotten blown up if she'd arrived two minutes earlier.). So far, so scriptwise understandable, but it amuses me a bit that the actual Prime Minister at the time, Herbert Asquith, who was far more anti-female vote than DLG, doesn't get as much as a name call when one of the most prominent actresses of the movie, Helena Bonham Carter, is a direct descendant.
Speaking of whom: following the rule that when she is cast outside of her Burton formed Goth girl persona, she's excellent, I found her very good here as Edith the pharmacist who also has the sole consistently supporting husband of the movie characters.
Let's see, what else: the movie makes it clear that Maude's boss at the laundry has sexually preyed on her and many other women, and that he's now moving on to Violet's 14 years old daughter Maggie, without actual sex scenes or naked women. That all the workers are so used to this that it doesn't even occur to anyone, including Violet when she gets fired (for her political activities), to protest against this, is an additional gut wrenching circumstance. Maude finally (and satisfyingly) explodes at him, but only after being fired herself.
Emily's last words, reciting the movement's slogan "never surrender, never give up the fight" unfortunately can't help associating Galaxy Quest these days ("Never give up, never surrender!"), which makes me wonder whether the Galaxy Quest scriptwriters knew their suffragette history.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 10:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 11:19 am (UTC)Disraeli had been more sympathetic (the 1867 Electoral Reform Act arguably enfranchised women on a point of interpretation but the resulting lawsuit - Chorlton v. Lings - went the other way) but his personal relationship with the Queen who was vehemently opposed to women's suffrage meant he couldn't do anything too overt.
There was also a lot of splitting in the ranks between the militant WSPU who were fighting on a single issue and the various suffragist bodies who were fighting for more generalised social reforms.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 03:02 pm (UTC)I have read that women were quite close to getting the vote in 1913, but that the government basically asked them to put it on hold for the war, and they did, with promise that they'd get some kind of vote after, which did happen, but that's very difficult to show in the confines of this movie. They did all the work! Then... waited for five years.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-12 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 07:39 am (UTC)The film, however, has been widely criticized for excluding minorities. For example, Hanna Flint has raised the issue, pointing out that Indian women participated in the Suffragette movement. The most prominent example is Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the last Maharaja of Punjab, who not only vigorously campaigned for the movement but was also a prominent financial supporter of it. Flint also points out that the film essentially whitewashes the Indians out of Bethnall Green, Maud and Violet’s neighborhood.
The film-makers have responded to these criticisms. Abi Morgan certainly knew about Princess Sophia; in an interview, she mentions a biography of Sophia as one of three books she read about the Suffragettes before writing the script. Director Sarah Gavron has acknowledged some of the criticism in an op-ed. She argues that they chose to omit Princess Sophia and other Indian women for two reasons. First, the film was focused on Lower Class women, and Sophia and the other major Indian Suffragette, Bhikaiji Cama, were Upper Class, and because the records of the period do not show evidence of substantial minority participation in the more militant end of the Suffrage movement. The one known photo of Indian women protesting for suffrage dates to a year before the events of the film and depicts a non-militant protest. And Duff insisted to Hanna Flint that there were in fact women of color in the laundry scenes, although I didn’t notice them and Flint points out that their names don’t appear in published cast lists.
So the omission of women of color was not born out of ignorance, but was rather a conscious decision on Gavron’s part. In her opinion, there were not enough Lower Class Indian women involved in the movement to justify their inclusion in the film. While her choice is problematic because it produces an all-white cast at a time when there is a strong push for more racially-inclusive film-making, as a historian, I can respect the fact that she made her choice based on what she thought was the best evidence available and the explicit focus of the film.
On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that the main character of the film IS COMPLETELY FICTITIOUS. Bates, as I commented in my first post of the film, is essentially an Everywomen Suffragette, designed to illustrate the enormous sufferings that some Suffragettes experienced. That somewhat undermines Gavron’s defense that the film’s cast was dictated by historical fact. If it’s ok to make up Maud (and Violet and Ellen, and every other female character in the film other than Meryl Streep’s Emmeline Pankhurst), surely there was room to include an Indian women or two.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 07:52 am (UTC)In the Lloyd George miniseries I watched last year from the 1970s, that's actually partially the explanation they let him give when a (female) character asks him why he doesn't support etc.; whereas this movie basically simplifies it to "men don't want to give up power" as the explanation for the male characters' (minus Edith's husband) behavior from the government downwards to Maude's husband Sonny. Which, well, same basic principle, but I think giving the political context at least in broad outlines (and definitely the property qualification information) would have added to the dimensions of this movie.
re: Victoria being so vehemently opposed to women's suffrage, do we know why? I mean, did she ever give a specific reason, or was it just "as God intended" etc.?
no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 07:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 08:25 am (UTC)So it makes much sense for the movie to end before World War I, because of of this really can't be explained in a few short scenes, let alone in few lines of end credits, I get that. But I also can't help but feeling that if you choose to focus your movie on working class women (very laudably so!), not middle or upper class women, you ought to at least mention there were some political disagreements within the movements that concerned specifically the working class.
ETA: just found this little gem: Vanessa Redgrave as Sylvia Pankhurst in "Oh!What a Lovely War", making one of RL Sylvia's anti war speeches, here.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 09:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-13 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-14 01:49 am (UTC)Sian Phillips is my One True Mrs Pankhurst.
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Date: 2016-02-14 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-14 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-14 03:07 pm (UTC)