Starring Carey Mulligan. Rated PG.

With everyone from the Taliban to anti–Planned Parenthood Republicans rolling back rights gained by women in the past century, it’s worth looking back at the shockingly long struggle for basic equality.

Suffragette was directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Abi Morgan, who joined forces for Brick Lane. (Morgan also scripted The Iron Lady, the weak-kneed Margaret Thatcher flick.) The term suffragette is itself shamefully condescending, implying that women’s access to democracy is just a miniature version of men’s.

Set just before the First World War, the movie gives no sense of the growing labour-union movement and other rebellious impulses that carried nascent feminism across class lines. It seethes with good intentions and bad behaviour. The filmmakers rest the entire story on Carey Mulligan’s fictional Maud Watts, a lifelong laundry worker who almost accidentally steps into the fray.

It’s an understandable strategy for gaining audience identification, but means that Maud must bear overwork, underpay, sexual harassment, physical injury, hostile neighbours and coworkers, a reactionary husband (we liked Ben Wishaw better when he was the bear’s voice in Paddington), the loss of parental rights, and torture in prison, among other indignities. Well, she does get to testify before Parliament, but that upbeat moment happens early.

There are other people in this strangely inert tale, well-dressed but stifled by too many handheld close-ups and TV-level music, with some based on real activists. Meryl Streep has just one scene as movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and Helena Bonham Carter has a few more as a chemist who inspires violent protest—leading to bru­tal responses from a police inspec­tor played by Brendan Gleeson, who at least appears slightly conflicted. The fact that Bonham Carter’s own great-grandfather was, in fact, the prime minister in 1912 illustrates our proximity to that fractious time—something the film itself, sadly, fails to convey.