Sally Hawkins dominates 'Lost King'

      Director Stephen Frears has made groundbreaking movies (My Beautiful Launderette) and movies that haven’t matched his best work (Victoria & Abdul). Now comes The Lost King, a movie based on a screenplay be Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope. 

      Lost King may not be a landmark work for Frears, who's now 81, but a memorable performance by Sally Hawkins keeps the movie on track.

     The Lost King tells the story of Philippa Langley, the woman who instigated the real-life effort to discover the remains of King Richard III. If you recall the news stories from 2012, Richard’s bones were discovered in the parking lot of a social services office in Leicester. The less-than-majestic setting turned the discovery into irresistible headlines fodder.

      But the movie is more about Philippa than the king Shakespeare vilified. At the outset, a downtrodden Philippa is passed over for a promotion at work. A bit harried by her two young sons, she's   separated from her husband (Coogan). A new love interest hasn't kept him from remaining part of Philippa's life.

     Hawkins mixes insecurity and assertion as Philippa embraces a quest that few others take seriously, including representatives of the academic establishment she eventually encounters.

     The screenplay tells us Philippa’s interest was sparked by a production of Richard III. She was taken with the performance of the actor (Harry Lloyd) who played Shakespeare’s fabled hunchback.

    As the movie develops, Philippa begins seeing Lloyd as Richard everywhere she goes. I’m not sure we needed visual assistance to understand Philippa’s obsession. Hawkins makes Philippa’s undaunted commitment clear enough -- sans hallucinations.

    Before launching her project, Philippa joins a branch of the Richard III Society,  a group that harbors a contingent of Richard nerds, some of whom claim that Richard was neither a hunchback nor the ambitious murderer of Shakespeare’s play. He was, they insist, a rightful king, England's last Plantagenet monarch.

   Philippa's work picks up speed after she convinces an archaeologist (Mark Addy) to join her search, but her instincts prevail over his more measured approach. 

   Eventually, hypocritical institutions try to cash on Philippa's work but Frears sticks to the point: Sometimes, it takes an obsessive outlier to push a cause to its satisfying conclusion. Philippa did that for Richard; Hawkins does it for the movie.

An aging queen finds renewal

Victoria & Abdul focuses on Queen Victoria and the Indian Muslim who perked up her final years.

If nothing else can be said about Victoria & Abdul, a nicely appointed period piece starring Judi Dench as England's fabled Queen, it should be noted that director Stephen Frears has come up with one of fall's best special effects. No, it's not an explosion and it has nothing to do with the far reaches of space; Frears's great contribution to the world of effects arrives in the form of a sculpted, multi-colored gelatin dish that is served as dessert to the Queen, who -- in her dotage -- no longer has the most impeccable table manners.

The dessert serves as a reminder of courtly opulence, a bit of ornamentation that tells us far too much time is being spent on matters of far too little importance.

Enjoyable in the way of slightly wry British period pieces, Victoria & Abdul is so dominated by Dench that it could have been named solely for the Queen who ruled from 1837 to 1901. Victoria died at the age of 82 to be succeeded by her son Edward VII whose reign lasted a mere nine years.

When we meet the Queen, she's in that phase of life in which she's being indulged (sometimes grudgingly) by the royal household that attends to her. She falls asleep during formal dinners and needs servants to help her to sit upright in bed, as if they were pushing a great rock up a steep hill.

As imagined by Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall, the Queen's problems are twofold. She's bored and lonely, never having totally recovered from the death of her husband Albert, some 31 years prior to the start of the movie.

The emotional vacancies in Victoria's life are addressed when chance brings an Indian Muslim to London to present the Queen with a ceremonial coin. Tall and handsome, Abdul (Ali Fazal) arouses the Queen's interest. She gives him and another Indian jobs as footmen and later makes Abdul her munshi; i.e., her teacher in matters pertaining to the mysterious ways of the East. Victoria learns Urdu and listens as Abdul slips in the occasional slice of wisdom gleaned from the poet Rumi.

In the early going, Frears sets a mostly comic pace, suggesting that he may be trying to mock the pretentious formalities of court life. The burden of representing all this pretension falls on actors surrounding the Queen: Tim Pigott-Smith as her flustered secretary, Michael Gambon as the dour prime minister, and Eddie Izzard as Bertie, the Queen's ambitious but patently hollow son and heir.

Dench, who played Queen Victoria in 1997's Mrs. Brown, provides the best reason to see the movie. She makes the Queen's loneliness convincing and even conveys hints of girlish infatuation as she gets to know Abdul. She's charmed by him. She badly needs to be charmed by someone because everyone around her seems to have curdled into near-parodic members of the aristocracy.

But Victoria & Abdul has more in mind than comedy. It also assays the cultural frictions created by the presence of a Muslim in this upper-class gaggle of bigots and stuffed shirts, a crowd in which eyebrows seem to be raised in perpetual disapproval.

Victoria & Abdul is based on a true story, but I don't know whether it's accurate to say that in her final years, Victoria tried to pierce the curtain of propriety that surrounded her, taking aim at the royals who wanted Abdul sent back to Agra, India, and the obscurity from which he emerged.

Unfortunately, Abdul becomes a kind of prop, a character who allows Victoria to show her decency, as well as to make one last stab at asserting her authority. When Abdul's wife and mother-in-law arrive, their faces are hidden behind burqas. In a way, Abdul himself remains hidden. Is he a simple naif whose motives are pure? Is he a bit of a charlatan trying to advance himself? Frears would have done well to give us more than glimpse into Abdul's soul.

Speaking of Frears, it's worth noting that some of his sharper edges seem to have soften from the days of the 1980s when he gave us movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Dangerous Liaisons. There are traces of bitterness and restrained sarcasm in Victoria & Abdul, but nothing the will unsettle most viewers.

Though their main characters find themselves in quite different circumstances, Victoria & Abdul seems aligned with Frears's Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) in which Meryl Streep plays a deluded New York heiress. Both movies have crowd-pleasing elements and moments of rue and both deal with aging women who face debilitating losses of luster as the ticks of mortality's clock grow ever louder.

Judi Dench triumphs in 'Philomena'

An aging woman tries to locate the son that was taken from her.

Philomena, a new film from director Stephen Frears, deals with the legacy of the Magdalene laundries that blighted the Irish landscape until deep into the last century. In this case, an asylum located in an abbey staffed by nuns, took in girls who had the misfortune to become pregnant. These young women were forced into difficult physical labor and were treated with the kind of scorn the outwardly pious often aim at those whom they regard as sinners.

The girls toiled in laundries under sweat shop conditions, were shown little compassion and only were allowed to see their kids for an hour a day.

We've had other movies about women who found themselves in Magdalene asylums, notably 2002's The Magdalene Sisters, a tough drama written and directed by actor Peter Mullan. But this one is different, a movie that derives its tone from its main character, Philomena Lee, a woman who was not defeated by terrible early experiences.

Working from a script by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope (based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith), Frears tempers outrage with comic elements and with the resolved but gentle spirit of his main character, played with tenacity and humor by Judi Dench, an actress whose gifts are well known.

In 1952, the pregnant Philomena was placed in a Magdalene laundry by a father who rejected her and who regarded her as a fallen woman deserving of eternal shame. To make matters worse, Philomena -- played in early scenes by Sophie Kennedy Clark -- had to endure the agonies of unwanted separation from her three-year-old son after the boy was adopted by a well-heeled American couple.

Most of the story takes place some 50 years after this emotionally devastating event. Philomena -- now in her 70s -- wants to locate the son who was taken from her. All she knows is that the boy was brought to the U.S.

To help her, Philomena enlists the services of Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), a journalist who lost his job as a PR man in the Blair administration. At professional loose ends, Coogan's Sixsmith initially resists any involvement with what he considers a potentially mawkish human interest story.

Obviously, Sixsmith ultimately signs on, his interest fueled by a sense of anger at the injustice suffered by Philomena. Sixsmith is a fallen away Catholic, an atheist and a staunch critic of the church.

Ironically, Philomena, who has far more reason to be bitter about religion, hasn't forsaken her faith. She seems to have accepted the fact that the world of her girlhood mostly has vanished. She even makes a point of telling Sixsmith that some of the nuns she encountered were kind.

Moreover, Philomena's attitudes about sex are surprisingly relaxed. She remembers her early encounter with the young man who got her pregnant as entirely pleasurable.

In a telling image, Philomena looks at a suggestive billboard in an airport: Dench's face registers recognition of the impossibly wide gap that has opened between what Philomena experienced as a girl and contemporary norms regarding sexual behavior. Had she been born 50 years later, her story would have been impossible.

Coogan, who normally plays comic roles, brings welcome restraint to his portrayal of a journalist who eventually finds the spark that ignites his indignation. Unlike Philomena, Sixsmith has no interest in forgiving the nuns who once made her life a living hell and who continued to deceive her as an adult.

Frears lightens the mood with odd-couple contrasts that emerge when Philomena and Sixsmith travel to the U.S. in search of her son. Sixsmith greets Philomena's devotion to romance novels with eye-rolling elitism. He's also put off by her lack of taste, expressed by her delight in watching movies such as Big Momma's House.

There's much more to the story than I've suggested here. But for those unfamiliar with the tale, it's best to allow its various contours to emerge in a theater.

Know, though, that Frears -- in workman-like fashion that serves the material -- offers a cinematic essay on tolerance, compassion, forgiveness and the way unjustifiably stern judgments can echo throughout a life long after the cruelty has stopped.

'Lay the Favorite': A break-even bet

Director Stephen Frears offers a light take on the world of gambling.

After watching Lay the Favorite, the latest film from British director Stephen Frears, I turned to the Rotten Tomatoes web site to see how the film -- which debuted at last January's Sundance Film Festival -- had fared with other critics.

I was shocked to see that Lay the Favorite, a gambling comedy based on a true story, had scored a paltry 26 percent on the Tomatometer. In other words, most of the critics that Rotten Tomatoes tracks not only disliked Lay the Favorite, they came close to hating it.

I admit to shock because Lay the Favorite, which could be considered a very distant cousin of such Frears' movies as 1990's The Grifters, hardly qualifies as an object for cinematic scorn. It's not Frears's best work, but it's a colorful and sometimes amusing look at people who make their living betting, and it involves characters who aren't pushed to the tawdry limit.

Casting way against type, Frears puts British actress Rebecca Hall in the role of a private dancer who sets out to break new career ground in Las Vegas. After failing to land a job as a cocktail waitress, Hall's Beth Raymer finds work placing bets for a professional gambler (Bruce Willis) who's attracted to her abilities with math -- as well as to the way she fills out a pair of short shorts.

Problems arise because Willis's character -- one Dink by name -- is married to Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones) a woman who doesn't like competition. Tulip takes a strictly business approach to marriage: She insists that Dink vowed to take care of her, and says she'll reciprocate as long as he doesn't stray.

The screenplay, based on a memoir by the real Beth Raymer, also introduces a New York-based bookmaker. An over-zealous Vince Vaughn plays Rosie, a gambler who's as impressed by himself as he is by any of the teams on which he bets. Unlike Dink, Rosie's an illegal bookmaker, and Beth goes to work for him in New York when things turn sour in Las Vegas.

Along the way, Beth becomes involved with a journalist (Joshua Jackson), a mostly normal guy who represents -- at least for a time -- a break with the hustling world.

The major achievement of the screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis, involves the ways in which the characters are forced to behave challenge our initial assumptions about them. And although none of the performances are likely to turn up on Oscar's short list, they're mostly within the range of what Frears is looking for, a slightly cracked comedy lodged in the unpredictable world of gambling.

Lay the Favorite isn't a change-your-life movie. I'm not sure it has a whole lot to say, but it doesn't take itself seriously enough to qualify as a demonstrably bad bet.