Great acting can’t hold ‘Suffragette’ together

Suffragette is a fictionalized story of a cell of women who fought for women’s right to vote in England in the early 1900s. Carey Mulligan (The Great Gatsby), Anne-Marie Duff (The Madeline Sisters) and Helena Bonham Carter star. Mulligan plays the main character, while Duff and Bonham Carter have supporting roles.

Meryl Streep — in misleading marketing — is billed as starring but she’s only in one scene. Streep plays England’s real life movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst.

Mulligan is Maud Watts. She and her husband Sonny work in a laundry and have a nice little boy. Life is hard, but they seem happy. The plot plods slowly along, and then things happen at the laundry that drag a reluctant Maud into the fray.

That involvement eventually turns tragic.

You are never connected to Maud or to her co-conspirators. No matter what happens to them, you feel nothing. It’s just a story about a space in time where injustice for women ruled. There is a scene about two-thirds the way through the movie involving Maud that should have — at the very least — generated anger and sorrow, or both, and emotions that border on tears.

But you feel nothing.

Admittedly, the acting is superb. That’s a given, considering the cast, but writer Abi Morgan’s (The Iron Lady) script and her characters lack depth. Director Sarah Gavron — who hasn’t done anything you’ve heard of — then takes those two-dimensional characters and Morgan’s so-so script, wastes the terrific performances and pretty much makes this a paint-by-numbers movie experience.

This story was originally published December 10, 2015 at 4:10 PM with the headline "Great acting can’t hold ‘Suffragette’ together."