Suffragette

First Hit:  Just before the final credits roll, the audience gets a strong message about just how difficult it has been for women to have a voice in the country they live.

This story takes place in Britain, but when the end of the film comes, it is a testament to every woman in every country in the world.

In the US women didn’t get to vote until 1920. In Switzerland 1971. And there are many countries that women do not have the right to vote. It is one of the primary downsides of Muslim countries and some interpretations of Islamic law – women who make half the world’s population had little say in the way the world is run. It makes me incredibly sad, filled with disappointment and to me shocking that although we can make huge forward leaps in the world technology, we have silenced so many people by not giving them a voice in how the world is run.

The Suffragette movement in Britain was an underground affair where women would meet, with the support of a few men, in clandestine ways to organize marches and protests against the English government. Leading this movement is Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep) who in a couple of scenes sets the tone for the real foot soldiers, Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff), and Maud Watts (Carrie Mulligan). Watts has a young boy and she’s worked at a laundry company her whole life. She tries to stay out of trouble, but as her bravery begins to grow with the injustice she sees around her, she ends up being one of the stronger voices and leaders of this group of women trying to make a change.

The cost is high. Men run the country and families and she loses her son to her husband who then sends the boy off with another family. She’s living in the street, family gone, but sees that this is the only path for her – getting the vote, and getting more say in her life and country.

The dialogue is very strong and many of the scenes/sets are perfectly attuned to the time and feeling of this darkness coming to light.

Mulligan is terrific. She is believable and carries the inner strength needed to make her choices congruent with the part through and through. This is a wonderful role for her. Duff is equally strong as a woman having to also make hard choices, especially when she becomes pregnant again. Carter is very strong as a medical practitioner, who uses her connections and supportive husband to keep the movement going. Finbar Lynch as Carter’s husband Hugh is incredibly wonderful in his very subdued background supportive role. Abi Morgan wrote a great script which evoked strength and fear in strong reflective ways. Sarah Gavron had excellent control of the script and subject. She made this come alive in an intelligent manner.

Overall:  The film was very good, but when the list of countries appeared on the screen listing the years they gave women the vote, it put a very loud and strong exclamation point on the subject.

The Invisible Woman

First Hit:  This film had possibilities but really failed to deliver feeling.

This is a film about a famous writer (Charles Dickens) who meets a younger woman and keeps her as a secret girlfriend. So what is the interesting about this story - not a lot. Therefore it would have to be the acting of this story to make it compelling to watch. 

From that end Ralph Fiennes (Dickens), Nelly, the younger woman, (Felicity Jones) and her mother Francis Ternan (Kristin Scott Thomas) did a good job of making the story interesting. However, by the next day it was gone, the thoughts, feelings and the story.

Even though there were strong attempts to share a story about breaking free from the norms of that society, there just wasn’t enough there to make this film unique or stimulating or even thought-provoking.

Fiennes was strong enough to be a good Dickens. Jones was the most interesting character. Her intelligence and clarity of action was very good. Scott Thomas was good as well. Abi Morgan wrote an adequate screen play about a mostly conventional subject matter. Fiennes had a good hand on the tiller of this story, but it was the story itself that lacked punch.

Overall:  This was a many told story that lacked something unique.

Shame

First Hit: A deep and dark film about a very difficult subject.

The difficult subject is sexual addiction.

How does a director take on this subject and keep it R rated? Probably not and therefore this film does have a NC 17 rating.

The rating comes because of the sex acts and full frontal nudity. However, the sex isn’t arousing, or at least I didn’t find it so, I found it factual and clearly making sex the object of Brandon’s (played by Michael Fassbender) deep driving dependence.

Like other things people become dependent/obsessed/addicted to, sex is very difficult because it is linked directly with others. The addicted person often requires partners to fulfill their addition. Here we find Brandon, using the internet to masturbate to, picking up strangers, and his life is clearly being driven by where he is going to get-off next.

He’ll masturbate in the restroom at work, he’ll hire hookers to come to his house, and he’ll lure unsuspecting women into uncaring sex. To live with this, he has to be smart, calculating, unencumbered and it is best that he is all alone in the world.

He is all these except he has a sister Sissy (played Carey Mulligan) who, in an early scene where we hear her phone message, we can tell is also troubled. Brandon ignores her messages. Sissy shows up to stay with him for a few days because she has nowhere else to go.

Immediately the audience knows that there is painful shameful history between them. Either they know something about the other or there is personal intimacy (incest). We never really know.

We watch their interaction and it is touchy, intimate, explosive, and caring. She is a cutter, he has a sexual addiction, they both want a different life, they do the best to hide their shameful ways.

Fassbender is phenomenal as the intelligent, deeply troubled and addicted to a natural human act, man. His performance was fearless and powerful. Mulligan has fully graduated from playing young girls to showing some real range as Sissy, a confused, wounded, caring woman. Her version of "New York, New York" was haunting and felt as though it walked a very fine line of god awful and genius. Lucy Walters as a woman on the subway was amazingly entrancing. Nicole Beharie, as Brandon’s office mate Marianne, was perfect at drawing out Brandon into almost humanness. Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen wrote a powerful and intense script. Steve McQueen did an amazing job of presenting this very disturbing powerful subject.

Overall: This was a difficult to watch, emotionally deep and thoughtful film.