★ 6 / 10
With rumblings coming from the wires about some
CinemaSerf
With rumblings coming from the wires about some Argentine activity on the remote island of South Georgia and Margaret Thatcher’s first administration…
With rumblings coming from the wires about some Argentine activity on the remote island of South Georgia and Margaret Thatcher’s first administration struggling to deal with the gloomy British economic outlook, jaded radio journalist “Penfield” (Jonathan Pryce) finds himself trying to stay motivated despite the fact that he hasn’t a penny to his name. In search of at least a degree of self-fulfilment, he decides to write a book all about the Franco-British invasion on the Suez Canal in 1956. He has an interest in the geo-political dynamics and history of those turbulent events, and so sets about lining up some interviewees to put some flesh on the bones and it’s whilst he is researching, he encounters the redoubtable “Ann” (Rosemary Harris) whose left wing political agenda chimes a little with his but more revealingly shows him up as a bit of an intellectual lightweight. Indeed, his lack of societal “evolution” is all too clearly demonstrated as he visits his poorly mother and his father, both traditional working class and proud parents, with whom he has but a tangential connection nowadays. To be honest, I found this all to be a little too pedestrian and introspective a tale of a man who probably started out as an idealist but who was complicit in letting the system grind him down into a supercilious cynic. Pryce delivers well enough but with so little by way of characterisation to work with it all rather drearily meanders along. Harris, on the other hand, has less to do but makes much more of her role as a women still tainted by life, but much more in control of what she thinks and what she wants. Of course there is some political commentary here, and a thinly veiled critique of all things Conservative and capitalist - either contemporary or during Suez when Eden was at the British helm, but that’s also rather undercooked and disappointingly predictable. All in all it comes across as a television movie in terms of the production, the score and the photography and though watchable enough as a comment on Britain at the time, isn’t really very memorable.
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★ 6 / 10
A Dog's Dinner rather than a Ploughman's Lunch
goldgreen
Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining. I saw it on release and again for the second time…
Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining.
I saw it on release and again for the second time this week and the lasting impression is a dog's dinner of ideas. At the centre there is a doomed romance, overlaid with a smorgasbord of messages inter-weaved in the script.
I shall attempt to list these message here.
a) The long term decline of Britain's importance in the world, b) the folly of the Suez expedition and a sort of oblique parallel with the Falklands War which doesn't work - Suez was a disaster, the Falklands campaign successful, c) the emotional toughness/nastiness of the Thatcher government, d) the Greenham Common anti-nuclear encampment (not sure what this is doing in the film), e) the lies sold by advertising, f) the bias inherent in the way we rewrite history, g) the English class system, h) the emotional coldness of journalists. Phew!
Added on to this, we have the conundrum of our hard to like hero James Penfield who wants love, but does not show it to those who love him. Crucially, he is foolishly chasing a snooty, upper (ruling) class girl whose own frivolous behaviour seems to be a comment on Britain's decline.
The real shame is that there are some fantastic parts to the film. Rosemary Harris is just perfect as the love seeking historian. And, then there is the cinema magic of filming the denouement to the central romance within the real-life setting of the Conservative Party Conference. With a few changes this film could have been up there with Performance and Brief Encounter, instead of an obscure curio of British cinema.
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6.1/10
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