Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play such as 1938's One Third of a Nation, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live life honestly, outside of politics, only to find such living impossible: The system is rigged! Our Joe, a fellow audiences are pressed to feel is quite like them, gets ground down by institutional unfairness, often treated no better than those minority classes with which the target audience might not want to identify. But then, at long last, facing no other recourse, Joe fights back, reborn a radical.
That formula — the little guy who finally pushes back, bringing an audience of little guys along — is as enduring as the image of Steinbeck's Okies squatting on their hams and wondering how the country's gone mean.
Why devote so much time to convincing us that women should have the right to vote?
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Most curious of all is Sarah Gavron's Suffragette, about a civil rights battle that precedes One Third of a Nation by a generation. Perhaps you could make a case for why those dramas about gay Americans besting injustice might strain to reach out to audiences that aren't yet quite onboard — but why must Suffragette devote so much of its running time to convincing us and its lead that, yes, truly, women should have the right to vote?
Carey Mulligan plays our Joe, in this case a Maud. Like Tom Joad before her, she simply wants to live and work, in this case in Britain at the dawn of the 20th Century. She's a laundress, toiling away, scalded by steam, raising a son with a husband who doesn't think of her as a person. One evening, delivering a parcel for her boss, Maud sees a suffragette chuck a rock through a shop window and scream demands about extending the vote to women. The scene plays out with prickling unease: Gavron appreciates audiences' distaste for destruction, even in the name of this most just of causes.
It's inevitable that we will witness Maud's radicalization, and getting there is a predictable slog despite Mulligan's skillful depiction of a woman discovering herself while bearing up through an ordeal. Maud is a fiction, so the specifics of her suffering are purely illustrative — stops on a tour, arranged for our benefit, of how the world used to punish women. Some of this slips into melodrama of the cheap sort: Her husband boots her out after she's arrested for participating in a public demonstration, and later she happens to pop in for a hopeful visit at precisely the moment he is turning their son over to new adoptive parents.
Certainly, tragedies like that were not uncommon. But Abi Morgan's script emphasizes them at the expense of depicting the historical moment itself. Is it asking too much that a drama about the triumph of the suffrage movement trust us to get from the start that this was a cause worth fighting for? Or that when the nonfictional Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press) makes a profound sacrifice at the film's climax, perhaps she should be someone we feel we've met?
The film has inspired the now-familiar complaint of "whitewashing," of casting historical movements as exclusively white, while its defenders have argued that Suffragette — note that the title is singular — is one woman's story, not a summation of a movement. That defense fails to note why the movie is one woman's story: because the filmmakers presume it's easier to sell tickets to see a white woman suffering than a movement building bombs.
That limited perspective is not only a problem of representation, but it also robs the movie of dramatic revelation. The final third is a jumble of arrests, hunger strikes, truncated speeches, and attempts at something akin to domestic terrorism. Gavron shoots and stages these events with raw, street-level suspense, but they play as incidentally engaging rather than vital parts of a greater whole. Because so much movie has been devoted to Maud's awakening, there's too little time for the things we're awakened to: the organized suffragettes themselves, whose strategies and divisions and supportive structures get teased only in quick glances.
Meryl Streep, all over the advertising for this film, has two scenes as the world-changing activist Emmeline Pankhurst, but in them, Pankhurst simply delivers public pronouncements: She's at a remove even as she calls for public destruction. Helena Bonham Carter impresses more in the role of a pharmacist who, along with her devoted and progressive husband, has taken to bombmaking. Gavron mounts crisp, provocative set pieces of activists blowing up an empty home and dropping explosives into mailboxes, but Suffragette skims over the fascinating questions of how such tactics were arrived at, of what other approaches were rejected, of just how far these women were willing to go.
The conversion-narrative approach precludes a structure as savvy as the one in Ava DuVernay's exquisite Selma, a film of negotiation and confrontation. Suffragette expends its energy selling us on what we already believe rather than examining the way these activists pressed the world into believing it.
Suffragette
Starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Anne-Marie Duff, Ben Whishaw, and Meryl Streep. Directed by Sarah Gavron. Written by Abi Morgan. 106 minutes. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday, November 6, at the Classic Gateway Theatre (1820 E. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; 954-763-7994; thegatewaytheatre.com).
