This story takes place in an era when women didn’t get to vote, weren’t thought to have the capacity for sexual pleasure and could be institutionalized for voicing a strong opinion. (Or, as Rick Santorum might describe it, the good old days.)
“Hysteria,” set in 1880s London, is a light comedy about a pretty dark time for the fairer sex. It finds some broad humor in “women’s specialist” Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), who ministers to socialites suffering anxiety, neurosis and a mysterious “feeling of expectation, of hungering.”
His new trainee, Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) — inspired by a real person — observes the treatment: a discreet “pelvic massage,” culminating in a shuddering “hysterical paroxysm.” Miraculously, this seems to stop the hungering.
Dishy Dr. Granville becomes a hit with the female clientele, and with Dalrymple’s daughter Emily (Felicity Jones), a model of propriety and domesticity whose talents include piano and phrenology, the short-lived Victorian science of reading the lumps on people’s heads.
But Dalrymple’s other daughter, Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), is a thorn in everyone’s side; a vociferous reformer who works with the poor, she indelicately points out that her dad’s simply using horny housewives to make big money (none of which he will donate to her settlement house).
Charlotte’s dialogue often seems culled from a book of suffragette quotes. But that patented Gyllenhaal pluck adds much to the role, especially when she’s teasing Dancy’s easily rankled Granville: “It must be difficult,” she says, “pleasuring half the women in the city.”
Though he sputters that “pleasure has nothing to do with it,” the younger doc’s hand is, indeed, spent. He finds accidental muscle relief at the home of his eccentric inventor buddy (Rupert Everett, at his funniest in years), whose electric feather duster inspires the first vibrator prototype. They test it on a former prostitute (Sheridan Smith) to great acclaim: “You’re going to need a bigger book,” she tells Granville’s receptionist, with a wink.
If director Tanya Wexler occasionally wanders into excess cutesiness — a cutaway to ducks getting it on, an opera singer performing a climactic aria on Granville’s table — she makes up for it with a surplus of eye-opening historical details and a refreshing warmth for all her characters, even the ones whose views are clearly on the way out.
I like to think of “Hysteria” as a companion piece to last year’s “A Dangerous Method.” Two decades before Freud and Jung were prescribing endless talk therapy for sexually frustrated women, a more direct cure was taking shape in London. The evolution of “Granville’s Hammer” can be seen in the closing credits, leading up to today’s best-selling “personal massagers”: the Rabbit, the Pocket Rocket and the Hitachi Magic Wand.