Put Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in the same movie, and good things will follow. But wait. That's already happened. In 2021's acclaimed The Lost Daughter, both actresses earned high praise for playing the same character at different ages.
Judging by Wicked Little Letters, a comedy also starring both actresses, the second pairing is far from a charm.
Based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters transports us to small-town England in the 1920s. Life becomes tense when residents of the coastal city of Littlehampton start receiving a flood profanity-laced letters.
An Irish immigrant with a young daughter, Buckley's Rose Gooding immediately falls under suspicion. Her staunchly religious next-door neighbor (Colman's Edith Swann) fans the flames of mistrust, pointing to Rose as the culprit.
Working from a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, director Thea Sharrock errs by serving up the story's big reveal after an hour, leaving 40 or so minutes still on tap.
Sharrock also relies too heavily on the presumption that audiences will be convulsed by hearing otherwise strait-laced characters spout the profanity found in the letters, which are often read aloud.
Some of the supporting cast seems stuck in a kitchen- sink drama. Timothy Spall plays Edith's domineering father, and Gemma Jones appears as her cowed mother.
It falls to a local police officer (Anjana Vasan) to clear up the mess. Her superiors want her to follow orders, much as her late father, also a cop, supposedly did. They have no interest in seeing a woman take any initiative.
Thematically, the movie seems intent on showing the commonplace misogyny that dominated the time, but these characters aren’t deep enough to fuel the kind of performances we expect from Colman and Buckley.
Buckley finds herself in a one-dimensional role that leans heavily on showy displays of pluck. Colman? Well, she's had better parts.
In an early scene, Rose coaxes Edith toward spontaneity while the feuding women, still able to abide each other, walk on a pebbled beach. We find few such relaxed moments, perhaps because the characters are often being pushed around by a plot that lays on thick helpings of drama when it's not looking for laughs.
Sharrock eventually starts speaking the language of caper movies, a tonal shift that may reflect an underlying confusion about what this broadly drawn comedy aims to accomplish.
By the end, a promising story has given way to blatant attempts at crowd-pleasing and the hopes I had for Wicked Little Letters had dimmed, faded ink on another set of high expectations.
3 comments:
What's happening to the film industry. They treat their customers to lessons in the own confused morality. This film is unwatchable, the only crime is the production it's self.
I agree: this film is unwatchable. With the usual wokery and inclusivity.
I watched Wicked Little Letters and thoroughly enjoyed it. I don’t know what you were expecting from the movie? It’s British humour and I for one miss the charming sentimental, tragicomedies that the Brits do so well. You say it didn’t go deep enough, but it wasn’t made as a serious deep drama. You seem to have missed the nuances in casting Ajana Vassan as Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss, Malachi Kirby as Bill - Rose Gooding’s new partner and Lolly Adefope as Kate the Post Office worker. I wasn’t sure about the casting of those roles because they are out of place for that period of time, but that is the point. To have had an all white cast wouldn’t have expressed the xenophobia of having an outsider in the village. The Outsider being the Irish Rose Gooding, the immorality of a woman having a child out of wedlock, the disdain towards the first woman police officer in the village of Littlehampton. There is a subtly in the casting that evokes the prejudices of the time. The real life judges were blatantly biased towards the pious, community spirited Edith Swan. Although the news of the libellous letters reached Parliament at the time, that isn’t what the focus of this story was about. I doubt that the real Rose would have garnered that much community support, but we do tend to favour the salt of the earth types over the stiff collared prudish Edith Swan personalities. The Brits usually come around to siding with the underdogs. I though the movie hit the mark without being offensive. It addressed feminism, social prejudice, and inner strength in a very British way. You say the film dragged out the last 40 mins of the big reveal, in reality, Rose DID go to prison - TWICE! The second time she was sentenced to 12 months hard labour, but Scotland Yard and the police eventually did become suspicious about Edith’s handwriting and they did set a trap for her using marked postage stamps. Finally, in the UK at least, among the ordinary folk, we still laugh in the face of adversity. It’s the only way to get through.
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