The Duke (2022) - Movie Review

A little over a year ago, I found myself in the midst of quarantine brain and, in a desperate attempt to return things to what can charitably be called ‘normality’ as we know it around here, decided to pick out a random film that was showing at the time and just… get the hell out of the house for a bit. Said film was Blackbird, an ensemble film that, while I honestly haven’t thought much about it since publishing my initial review of it, I can at least look back on with some fondness for not totally wasting my time.

And here I am again, in need of getting myself out of a static rut I have found myself in of late, and once again deciding to essentially throw a dart at the Now Showing list as an excuse to get back to work and (more importantly) get back into a stable routine. And once again, I find myself looking at a film by Roger Michell, who also made Blackbird, and… well, let’s just say that my previous criticisms about not feeling as strongly about the material don’t apply here. Hell, if I’m being honest, there’s a lot about this that I like.

The film itself, on the surface, isn’t much to be writing home about (and I’m pretty sure I’ve worn out any actual meaning in that phrase, since I do that for literally every movie I watch). Based on a genuine stranger-than-fiction event, it follows old-age pensioner Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) as, after a number of frustrating encounters with people when he’s trying to get work or fight for some kind of social progress, he decides to steal the Portrait Of The Duke Of Wellington, a famous painting by Francisco Goya that was being displayed at the British museum.

Broadbent has always been reliable as an actor, and his quite curmudgeonly and stubborn turn here as Kempton continues his healthy pedigree. He plays the character much like he did Timothy Cavendish in Cloud Atlas, where his outrage at the injustices and unfair treatment towards himself and others is tempered by how disregarded and occasionally inarticulate that same perspective is. Indeed, a lot of the film is built on the foundation of the British OAPs, a generation of people left behind by a country they likely served during one or both of the World Wars.

But, in keeping with the incredibly breezy and lightweight presentation, the actual impetus for the story is grounded in something rather mundane, and indeed, highly specific to the area: Television licenses. Put simply, in the British Isles, households are required by law to have television licenses to watch or record any transmissions from the BBC, beyond the base cost of antenna installation or the TV itself. Kempton, seeing as how he physically removed the part of his television that would let him access the BBC, doesn’t think he should have to pay the license. This is a decision that lands him, a sixty-year-old trying to make ends meet as a cab driver, in jail for thirteen days.

From there, the theft of the titular painting, both in and out of the on-screen narrative, becomes an afterthought next to what the conversation around it, of which writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman have a lot to say. Most of it is based in classist criticisms, getting into how the public’s taxes paid for the painting to be displayed, whereas the reward for its retrieval is a mere fraction of that initial cost, along with the idea of the Duke himself being glorified in this fashion and not the many, many officers that served under him. It’s surprisingly rousing and, for as overused as the word has become of late, woke in its philosophy, aided in no small part by how most of it is coming from Kempton himself, who helps ground it in working-class realism.

There is another major theme running through this film, and it’s something that is shared with Blackbird: Dealing with the death of a loved one. But whereas Blackbird was all about the anticipation of such an event, this stick firmly to death as recollection, as trauma, with Kempton and his wife Dorothy (an Irish-affecting Helen Mirren in one of her lesser recent performances, sad to say) dealing with the death of their daughter in a bike accident. Or, rather, not dealing with it, since Dorothy refuses to discuss it, and Kempton has been sitting on it for so long that he turned it into a teleplay he tried to get the BBC to adapt.

Kempton frames it (heh) as him not being able to do anything for the dead, but taking inspiration from that inability to help those who are still here, especially those who have been left behind like himself. “I am you, and you are me”, in his own words. This ends up tying into the initial spat concerning TVs as a way in which this generation of disregarded citizens can have some form of company in their lives. Even nowadays, where television production values are arguably higher than they’ve ever been previously, it’s easy to sneer at the disposability of TV programming… but considering the demographic in question, it (quite effectively) frames even the deprivation of that much as needless cruelty.

Basically, this is like a softer version of something Ken Loach would’ve ripped an audience’s tear ducts out with, taking an ostensibly silly plot (and tone, admittedly) and using it to really dig into the distinctions between those with privilege and those without. It’s got a conscious fire in its belly that I really wasn’t expecting from a film seemingly designed for fellow OAPs to watch on the telly at home and have a few polite chuckles. And along with its quite accurate classist observations and overall humanist appeals, its more morbid moments hit an especially strong chord seeing as this is, unfortunately, the last film Roger Michell directed before he died in September of 2021. And as much as I don’t want to cheapen real-life events (or, worse, go full sensationalist a la the worst kind of people from Velvet Buzzsaw), a film this in tune with tragedy and yet this hopeful is a warming note to go out on.