The Rights of Women: Suffragette reminds us of the struggle and danger

Sarah Gavron's 2015 Suffragette has its heart and its head in the right place: It's important to remember the struggle women went through, in Great Britain in particular, to win the right to vote, the danger suffragettes faced, and their bravery; and, as the movie makes plain in its closing credits (a la Spotlight), it's an on-going struggle, with so-called modern countries such as Saudi Arabia still denying women the right to vote (though it's not clear to me that anyone has the right to vote for anything meaningful in Saudi Arabia). Although Suffragette is by no means the first recent work to take up this theme, it's particularly eerie to watch it today, as we see the women engage in vandalism and even terrorism in service of their cause - acts that we so roundly condemn in other contemporary contexts. So the film forces us to think: Is the use of force justified? How much? Smashing windows (as the film begins)? Setting off bombs? Burning houses? More? All this thought-provocation is good, but I just wish it were a better film - though in fact it's so heavy-handed, with the women beatific and the men classic movie heavies and dolts, with the melodramatic score trying to hard to lift our emotions during key scenes that I wish could have been left alone to speak for themselves. The lead actors - Carey Mulligan especially - are fine, as is always the case in British films (though some of the lines are spoken so softly I almost needed subtitles); the period setting and details are also great: I've seen a lot of images of life in the mills, but this is the first I can recall that shows the difficult and dangers that women faced working with scalding tubs of water in an industrial-scale laundry. Some good, grainy documentary footage at the end highlights the factual basis behind the story - one of the suffragettes (not one of the leads) was based on a true martyr - I kind of wonder why the movie didn't opt to tell her story rather than a fiction about a woman slowly won over to the cause but at great personal cost.