Suffragette (2015)

Suffragette arrives with the gravity of a monument and the pacing of a well-funded museum exhibit. Sarah Gavron guides Carey Mulligan through the laundry rooms and prison cells of 1912 London, where Maud Watts is radicalized by a movement that costs her a job, a son, and eventually her dignity on a hunger strike. It is a sincere piece of historical melodrama, competently assembled and easy to admire. It is also unmistakably a product of its moment.

On the question of gender the film is unambiguous and thorough. Women occupy the center, a woman directs, and patriarchal violence (the supervisor's roaming hands, the force-feeding tubes, the husband's custody claim) drives the plot forward. Class enters through the laundry floor, where the wealthy Mrs Haughton can afford principles that working women cannot afford, though the economic argument never separates itself from the gender argument. The cast is female and formidable. It is also almost entirely white, and a promotional campaign that put Meryl Streep in a shirt reading "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" did the film no favors.

What remains is a handsomely mounted civics lesson. The closing scroll of dates and nations lands like the final slide at the end of a lecture, informative and faintly exhausting. There is real craft here, and Mulligan carries the weight of it. The film never lets us forget that it is teaching, and instruction, however righteous, tends to leave an audience sitting in the dark with its coat already on.