Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang
Had Carey Mulligan been born in a
different time and place, she likely would have become popular among painters
or photographers eager to explore the complexities of her amazingly expressive
features.
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| After being arrested a second time, Maud (Carey Mulligan) is presented with a tempting offer by Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson). He'll make the charges against her melt away ... if she'll become his spy. |
Her capacity for forlorn
resignation — for tolerant anguish, and acceptance of a fate that she
understands is unjust — is particularly acute. I imagine her becoming the face
of Dorothea Lange’s iconic, Depression-era photo, Migrant Mother.
Mulligan has demonstrated this
capacity for quietly compliant sorrow in several films, most notably 2010’s
haunting Never Let Me Go, likely to
remain one of the bleakest — and most cautionary — science fiction parables
ever made. What makes her work in such parts so memorably heartbreaking, of
course, is the perceptive intelligence that’s always present behind her melancholy
gaze.
She once again displays such
emotional intensity in yet another of this season’s cinematic depictions of our
turbulent past: the desperate, early 20th century nadir of the British women’s
emancipation movement, in director Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette. Scripter Abi Morgan — who won a well-deserved Emmy
Award for her compelling Cold War-era miniseries, The Hour — has surrounded Mulligan’s composite “typical
working-class character” with actual historical figures, to persuasively portray
what it must have been like for the agitators determined to win not only the
right to vote, but a greater measure of control over their own lives.
And dignity. Definitely dignity.
I never cease to be amazed —
becoming immersed in real-life stories of this nature — by mankind’s ability to
exceed even my lowest opinion of their behavior.
In this particular case, of
course, the emphasize is on mankind.
The setting is London in 1912,
where Maud Watts (Mulligan) and her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), work onerous,
back-breaking — and highly dangerous — hours in a laundry. The shop is run by
Norman (Geoff Bell), a slimy, lecherous brute who could have stepped right out
of a Dickens novel, and whose interest in Maud feels decidedly unhealthy: a
dynamic that Sonny obviously notices, but apparently chooses to ignore.
Maud’s world shifts slightly
when, heading home one day, she finds herself in the midst of a vandalizing
protest by members of the Women’s Society and Political Union (WSPU). Shop
windows are smashed; the perpetrators melt back into the crowd before the
police arrive ... but not before Maud recognizes one of them, Violet
(Anne-Marie Duff), as a co-worker.
