It’s been a while between drinks, but after a five-year gap since his last feature film, British director Stephen Frears is back in the cinema. Between 2015 and 2017, he came out with three films that I quite liked in The Program, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Victoria & Abdul, and as those were also my more formative years of trying to find my own voice as a critical writer, I’ve grown quite fond of the man’s style. And while I can certainly see what I liked back then still present today, there’s also a much more uneasy feeling attached to it this time around.
The film is a dramatisation of the discovery of King Richard III’s remains under a parking lot in Leicester, specifically from the point-of-view of writer and amateur historian Philippa Langley, here played by Sally Hawkins. As written by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, who both worked with Frears on Philomena and who starred in and wrote respectively the excellent vaudeville tragedy Stan & Ollie, Langley is given a connection to Richard in a number of ways, primarily to do with disability. Langley’s chronic fatigue syndrome has her at odds with her initial background as a sales rep, and after seeing a production of Shakespeare’s depiction of the King, she basically enters a state of hyperfixation, involving the buying of many books, joining a local historical society, and even seeing visions of the King himself.
I have… mixed feelings about all of this. On one hand, making this kind of empathetic connection on the basis of being unfairly disregarded due to disability is an interesting take, especially for someone so famously regarded as a villain like Richard III. Between hyperfixation being a common feature for those on the autism spectrum, and me and Richard apparently having the same physical disability in scoliosis, there’s quite a bit about this I can appreciate. Hawkins as Langley getting extra emphatic about historical bias and the perception of disability as deformity of body and spirit certainly helps with that.
But on the other hand, the way her interactions with Richard III are visualised is… concerning. Like, the fact that these are actual, verbal interactions, while being juggled with the humdrum and grounded framing (this isn’t exactly Ken Russell we’re talking about here), feels like a misstep as it is. But on top of that, having multiple scenes of her talking to (as far as other characters are concerned) thin air, while she keeps talking about her feelings to do with where she thinks Richard’s remains are, isn’t particularly flattering. Considering the real Philippa Langley both wrote the source material and is credited as an executive producer on this, it makes me wonder if her being portrayed as some kind of halfway mad seer was the intention here. Having the opening credits homage Alfred Hitchcock only muddies the waters further.
Then again, it is still clear that this is very much her own recollection and perspective on the story. There’s a special kind of irony in the fact that this film makes it a point to bring up that Shakespeare wasn’t writing about “recent history” when he constructed his play about the King, and yet this dramatisation is about such a recent moment in history that quite a few people and institutions that are featured in it are still alive and kicking. And judging by some of the responses, they’re also not particularly happy about being depicted as the sexist, ableist, and generally condescending obstacles between Langley and her surprisingly-accurate hunches (ba-dumb-tish).
Now, as I’ve said before, I try and focus on dramatisations like this as their own product, rather than a strict retelling of history, and a lot of this amounts to ‘he said, she said’ that I don’t feel all that comfortable commenting on the validity of. However, in fairness, I will say that with the exception of Lee Ingleby as Richard Taylor (the one who, in real life, looks ready to sue over his villainous portrayal in this), it’s rather even-handed in how it portrays everyone, Langley included. Her primary drive (in-film, at least) is to dispel the potential myths surrounding Richard III because… well, all people deserve to be remember as more than just good or bad, whether they’re royalty or just Joe Bloggs trying to get through the day.
The main reason why Stephen Frears has stayed on my radar for all these years is because, from what I’ve seen of his work, he has a thing about questioning conventional wisdom about the morality of certain people and activities. Lance Armstrong and the doping scandal, Florence Foster Jenkins and her lack of artistic ability, any of the other times he’s focused on a member of the British monarchy; he’s always made it a point not to pigeonhole anyone and create at least some kind of sympathy for his subjects. And at the same time, he doesn’t try and sanctify anyone, which here is shown with Langley basically having an over-idealised picture of Richard III in her own mind (for as much as she argues against Shakespeare’s interpretation of him, the central image she has is from that interpretation) and who ends up being corrected on a few things about him by film’s end. Again, all of this makes Richard Taylor’s characterisation a bit suspect, but overall, it emphasises flaws rather than irredeemable sins.
I mean, the film itself is just okay when it’s all put together. The more hallucinatory edges of the story, mainly concerning the visions of Richard III, feel like they belong in a much more madcap or possibly even psychotic film than this would ever be comfortable with being, and it does enter the realms of pantomime in how some of the characters are presented, even with its insistence that people aren’t entirely good or evil. But on the basis of its solid performances, its depiction of British royalty that doesn’t rely on fascination with said royals to be effective (trust an admitted British republican in Frears to make that one work), and the right-more-times-than-not understanding of disability in both past and present contexts, there’s enough here to be worth checking out as a somewhat breezy cinema outing.
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