How does one treat a movie that seems made to be taken seriously as drama, but really only succeeds as melodrama? Set in 1912 East London, it wraps real historical characters around the tale of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a young laundress, wife and mother who improbably finds herself joining with a freshly radicalized faction of the British women’s suffrage movement. And a brutal existence it is: police beatings, jailings, losing custody of her son, harassment by her employer and surveillance by a veteran inspector (Brendan Gleeson). Indeed, the story’s primary purpose seems to be chronicling in detail how awful it was to be at the forefront of this cause, and how horrible all the men (and women) standing in their way were. It works, for a while, on that visceral level of watching other people suffer for rights that are now taken for granted, but that’s really all it can manage. Leaving aside Gleeson’s constitutional inability to craft a performance that’s not multi-layered, it’s all about powerful emotional response to being on the right side of history. Think of it as “righteousness porn.” By Scott Renshaw