Jessie Buckley, Olivia Colman
“WICKED LITTLE LETTERS” My rating: B- (Netflix)
100 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Wicked Little Letters” is so crammed with familiar faces from Brit film and television that it’s a bit like reading the Equity membership list.
As it turns out, all that U.K. talent is what keeps the film from sliding into a morass of uneasily shifting tones. Or more accurately, the film suffers from neck-twisting tonal shifts but the great acting keeps us hanging in there.
Purportedly based on a real incident (I have my doubts) this effort from writer Jonny Sweet and director Thea Sharrock unfolds in the picturesque oceanside burg of Littlehampton in the years after World War I.
The first familiar face to greet us is the great Olivia Colman, here portraying the middle-aged spinster Edith Swan.
Edith lives with her parents, the domineering Edward (Timothy Spall!!!) and his long-suffering wife Victoria (Gemma Jones). She is shy, pious, unworldly, cowed by her father and oozes a goodie-two-shoes attitude that makes you want to slap her up the side of the head.
Here’s the problem. Edith has been receiving filthy notes from an anonymous persecutor. This mystery creep dishes sexual crudeness and personal insults in language that could make a longshoreman blush.
Mother Victoria is quite undone by this onslaught of vileness; father Edward demands that the local police find the perpetrator.
Suspicion almost immediately falls on the family’s next door neighbor, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking Irish war widow (or so she says) with a young daughter (Alisha Weir) and a live-in boyfriend (Malachi Kirby).
Until recently Rose and Edith had a sort of friendship (Edith sees it as her Christian duty to reach out to her hell-raising neighbor), but they’ve drifted apart. And then the wicked little letters began arriving.
The screenplay covers a lot of ground. There is, of course, Rose’s legal predicament. Charged with libel, she faces a year in prison and the loss of her child.
Then there’s the rampant chauvinism in which the film’s menfolk are steeped. Papa Edward is only the most obvious example. The police are sexist swine — we get an eye- and earful through the experiences of Gladys (Anjana Vasan), the town’s sole female officer, who slowly becomes convinced of Rose’s innocence.
When the officials decline even to look for other suspects, Gladys teams up with a couple of local ladies (Joanna Scanlan, Eileen Atkins) to secretly sleuth out the situation.
What they find…well, no sense giving too much away (even though most viewers will see it coming). Let’s just say that beneath the thin veneer of stiff-upper-lip propriety that dominates all aspects of British life there bubbles a cauldron of repressed sexuality and wanton rebellion that just has to assert itself.
Categorizing “Wicked Little Lies” is problematic. At times it’s broadly satiric, even silly…and then it dips into gut-wrenching melodrama as it examines the plight of the wrongly-accused Rose. The two attitudes are never reconciled — director Sharrock does a terrific job of creating a believable setting, but can’t find a way to pull all the pieces gracefully together.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 