On Chesil Beach (2018)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Even without having read Ian McEwan's novel, I found On Chesil Beach to be a diverting, engaging, funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately cold look at failed romance.

It begins with such promise. A young couple, clearly in love, spending their honeymoon together on a picturesque beach. The flat landscape, shimmering with reflections of sunlight, hints at the transcendence the innocent soon-to-be lovers will experience on their first night together. After a lovely dinner brought to their suite, and some polite if awkward conversation, things get more heated. That is to say, their erotic desires are so constrained by propriety that they are unable to communicate effectively.

Our awareness of their plight is also disjointed -- purposely -- through use of intermittent flashback. We witness the newlyweds meeting after their respective graduations, quickly falling in love, and arranging their wedding. Their families are quite different -- hers is wealthy and offer her higher ambitions while his is humble, poor, and aggressively kind -- but don't seem especially opposed to the union. Instead, we begin to see the two as being in love but nearly incapable of being alone together. This is highlighted during their dinner, as their farcical servers nearly ruin the evening's ambiance. The two make small talk, reminisce, and basically fail to ever meet each other on the same plane.

In an age of cinematic sex so explicit it becomes embarrassing or laughable (Fifty Shades of Grey), it's almost refreshing to see a movie about how awkward sex can be. Even for a married heterosexual couple, constraints of polite society -- trickling down from a lack of relevant education to an inability to communicate about what each wants or doesn't -- can severely (and fatally) limit our capacity to function intimately. Of course, there are other issues involved in this particular story: Edward's romantic efforts are thwarted by his heightened sex drive, while Florence may or may not have been molested by her domineering father.

The climax should be a heartrending confrontation on the beach, as Florence offers to be a platonic wife and to let her husband sleep with whomever he wants and Edward all but screams that he only wants her. And while the film to this point is effectively split between tender drama and farcical romance, the climax reaches a cold plateau that can't quite reconcile the themes at work with the aesthetic of the film. Immediately after, we dive headfirst into a lengthy denouement -- thirteen years later -- that tries to wrap things up in melodramatic fashion. Florence has remarried, borne children, and become the musical success she always dreamed of; Edward's life has been ruined by the woman who said she was incapable of physical carnality.

Though I trust that Ian McEwan -- who adapted his own work here -- is expanding his dramatic vision of his original story, I couldn't help but feel that this ending was anti-dramatic. Perhaps that's his point -- it's all anti-climactic as well, deliberately -- but it drains the themes at work of their potency. Instead we're left with a Hallmark-worthy epilogue that makes you roll your eyes in exasperation rather than tragedy. And the old-age makeup is pretty awful too.

Billy Howle does his best work yet, though, as Edward. If for nothing else, watch this movie for his performance.

Suffragette (2015)

Score: 4 / 5

If you, like I, saw some of the early advertisements for this movie, you probably avoided it for a while. A misguided photoshoot, you recall, for a particular Time Out article, featured in black-and-white coloring the four main actors in white t-shirts that read, "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave." Out of context, it's a troubling image that suggests slaves choose to be so, that only white women can be rebels or have the agency of choice, and that sexual injustice is historically the same as racial injustice. Furthermore, the film does not include so much as a passing reference to women of color advocating for suffrage in Britain at the time, such as prominent leader Sophia Duleep Singh, the Punjabi princess. Yet the film is not its marketing. Problematic and troubling as these choices were, Suffragette proves an effective movie with remarkably relevant messages.

This film, directed by Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane) and written by Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady), centers on a small group of working-class women in an isolated factory. As we saw in Detroit -- and in loads of historical films, actually, as The Patriot comes to mind -- it is unquestionably easier and usually more dramatically effective to explore a microcosm of some significant event than to survey an entire movement with too many characters and locations and times. This movie works so well because of its highly dramatized and somewhat fictionalized narrative. The real-life events were bigger than life, and so the specifics of the film are too. The whole thing may not be "true" but that doesn't mean the things it represents aren't.

Suffragette, as I said, follows a small group of factory women, specifically one Maud Watts played by Carey Mulligan. Seemingly by happenstance, she transitions from working on laundry to giving her testimony to parliament in an effort to gain the right to vote. Once denied that right, the women involved are beaten and jailed by the police, thus sowing the seeds of social justice in young Maud's heart. While she walks a dangerous personal line with her husband (Ben Whishaw), boss, neighbors, and coworkers, she finds friends who quickly band together and continue the civil disobedience. Joined by a cast of women soldiers including Anne-Marie Duff, Natalie Press, Romola Garai, and especially Helena Bonham Carter, these activists fearlessly fight the unjust law, brutal police (who knew force-feeding was so horrific to watch?), cruel husbands, and abusive employers. Jailed time and again, they paint a striking portrait of perseverance and desperation.

It's one of the best examinations in film of how and why activists can and often do turn violent to affect change: Their lives depend on it. Our expectations of early twentieth-century England are upturned by the fierce violence we witness. Gone are the strictures and finesse of Downton Abbey. Nowhere is the silly sweetness of Mrs. Banks, singing about being a "Sister Suffragette." This picture is filmed like a thriller, with a handheld camera that breaks any barrier between us and the action. Severe close-ups, thick atmosphere, and restricted vision keep things immediate and direct. Against a cold and bleak backdrop, the film highlights its own relevancy and declares its own burning anger. It's an urgent battle cry, one that will outrage you, work your tear ducts, and leave you breathless at its ending.

"I'd rather be a rebel than a slave," put back in its context, is the effective rallying cry of Emmeline Pankhurst, played by Meryl Streep. It's strange that she received such prominent billing for such a brief appearance (one scene, if I counted correctly). Pankhurst was, as history has determined, the iconic suffragist of the time, and so her appearance reminds us that the problems faced by our small band of heroines are reflective of the state of all women in Britain. Her presence, and the subsequent rioting, serves as a sort of turning point in Maud's character arc: Her firebrand style and oratory magic ignites a passion in Maud that radicalizes her and informs her behavior for the remainder of the film. It may not do quite the same for us, who know from history that Pankhurst's politics were not always so noble, but in the moment we understand how and why we would have gotten involved ourselves. Let us go forth and do likewise.

IMDb: Suffragette