"Suffragette" (2015)

I know what you're thinking, how does a world class d-bag like you care about women's right to vote...well...

...one of the terrible things about this movie is…who cares?

Yep, this movie REALLY falls under the category of…not that big of a scope. Though most of the people involve seem to think it’s a topic that is super important. I guess not to me. Worst, these types of movies are hard to negotiate, since it requires the person to have this one small detail in their life consume them. In other words, let’s say I make a movie about my love of vintage cameras. If they made a movie about that, it would be where every scene I’m in would require I talk about a vintage camera. Though not as trite as gear, it still is a small detail of a person’s life. It doesn’t eat up two hours…that’s for sure.

It’s about women’s right to vote. Which, in America, didn’t happen until 1920. In the U.K. it didn’t happen until years later. In Saudi Arabia, it just happened last year in 2015. Does that surprise you? Not really. We knew those sand monsters like to oppress women. Imagine if these filmmakers grew some balls and really attacked the problem. Well, you wouldn’t get funding from America. You certainly would be labeled a racist. Instead, British men are the enemy here. Carey Mulligan…the new feminist actress, stars as a woman who works at a landromat where the foreman/owner/manager (who fucking knows) is real rape-y. The details are vague, but it seems he chooses a different female worker to bang for favors. Carey, apparently, gets too old for the jerk, so he moves on. She also gets married to a co-worker and they have a son. She literally bumps into a woman’s voting rights activist and seems to accidentally trip into the suffragette movement. Women who use force to get the government to listen to their pleas of wanting to vote. Hot on their trail is a Jean ValJean type character played by Brendan Gleeson, who seems to pop up every time they need a ruddy faced bureaucrat.

You know I honestly could care less about making a man-hating movie. But to do it as ridiculous as this movie is pretty sad state of our desperation to right some wrong. There isn’t a sympathetic man in this movie. Well, one, but they gave him so little time. And, more or less, castrated him as he’s married to the Helena Bonham Carter character. The real problem with this movie is that it would’ve been much more interesting hearing about this mythical woman Mrs. Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep), then to follow a deep-in-the-trenches worker (which is a made up person) climb to the movement. This was a case where a woman’s hero’s journey seemed to be actually out of reach. A valiant attempt at what amounts to a sugar packet history lesson.