Tag: Harry Lloyd

The Lost King (2022)

Bizarre, grudge-settling comedy-drama that celebrates amateurism and hates experts

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Sally Hawkins (Philippa Langley), Steve Coogan (John Langley), Harry Lloyd (Richard III), Mark Addy (Richard Buckley), Lee Ingleby (Richard Taylor), James Fleet (John Ashdown-Hill), Bruce Fummey (Hamish), Amanda Abbington (Shelia Lock)

In 2012 the world’s media descended on Leicester after the body of King Richard III was discovered in priory turned car park. Richard III had long had passionate supporters – Ricardians – who rejected the idea that the man Shakespeare turned into Britain’s most hated monarch was anything of the sort. It was one of those fans, Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), who researched for 20 years to find evidence for where he was buried and became the public face of the search through ratings-winning television documentaries and writing a best-selling book.

All of this is rejigged in a silly, sentimental, bizarre film that repositions Langley as an inspired amateur butting heads with the self-promoting professionals of Leicester University. I suppose there is something ironic in a film which insists someone had their reputation sullied in the name of drama, itself sullies peoples names in the name of drama. (Richard Taylor, the deputy registrar of Leicester, here portrayed as a sexist, elitest self-promoter who mocks the disabled, has openly declared his intention to sue). The Lost King wants to be an affectionate Ealingesque comedy of the triumph of the little guy. It’s actually got an uncomfortable feeling of grudges being settled and a stench of Brexity anti-intellectualism.

Fascinatingly the anti-intellectualism even extends to Langley herself. Remember that 20 years of research? All deleted in this film. Here Langley is a working mum, suffering from ME (the film draws vague parallels between this and Richard’s scoliosis) who one day stumbles into a performance of Richard III and basically falls in love with the dead king. She pops down to a second-hand bookshop, buys eight books on Richard and in a few months is digging up the car park. It’s as if the idea she spent time in archives, triple checking sources, studying maps etc. would somehow have been “cheating” – that we could only root for her if she was an amateur, “one of us” who makes her (always correct) decisions purely on gut instinct.

But it fits with a film that portrays Leicester University as a sort of scheming club of middle-managers and moustachio-curling villains. No one from the university can so much as draw breath without disparaging “that woman” as an obsessive weirdo. They batter everyone with their expertise, arrogantly dismiss any ideas they don’t have themselves and stand around growling so Langley can puncture their pretention with her common-sense wisdom. Case in point: she suggests they overlay a modern map of Leicester over a medieval map to check locations. First they object, then look at her like she’s split the atom. Of course, they are right to object: medieval maps are hand-drawn approximations often more based on aesthetics than accuracy. But that doesn’t matter to the film, which of course immediately shows the two maps lining up in microscopic detail. If only 500 years’ worth of scholars could have thought of that, eh?

Embodied by Lee Ingleby’s Richard Taylor as a number-crunching obstructive bureaucrat who does everything he can to steal the credit (honestly, if you are going to take this kind of pop at a regular person at least change his name), Leicester University are unilaterally baddies. All this score-settling seems to have come from Langley’s resentment at not being invited to speak at a couple of press conferences. No matter that TV documentaries and books made her name synonymous with Richard III to anyone who really cares (even the film can’t pretend it’s telling “an untold true story”). This is a film with an axe to grind – so much so that the eventual discovery of Richard becomes secondary to this mud-slinging as Langley rebukes Taylor publicly (inevitably shaming him into silence) for equating disability with wickedness and cutting her out of meetings.

What’s particularly odd about The Lost King is that the film ends up painting Langley as exactly the kind of un-credible crank its villains (villainously) see her as. Having removed all her rigorous research, it replaces it with Having A Feeling. This is communicated visually with Langley communing regularly with a vision of Richard III, personified by the actor from the play she saw. Langley chats to this vision with the breathless excitement of a giddy teenager, and he helps her discover reams of facts, not least a bizarre moment of ecstasy when she spots an “R” in the car park and just knows Richard is under there.

Harry Lloyd is all adrift in this bizarre part and its main impact is to raise unfortunate giggles and make Langley look exactly like the sort of person you wouldn’t invest tens of thousands of pounds in. Mind you, Langley here is way more competent than any other Ricardian society member, all of whom are portrayed as cranks and pub bores, talking as if they only discovered famous primary sources this week, and utterly unable to even tie their own shoelaces until Langley sails in and discovers the king’s body in about ten minutes.

Hawkins plays a part firmly in her wheel-house, as an eccentric but determined woman in love with a ghost, while co-scriptwriter Steve Coogan generously writes himself a “stop reading Holinshed and look after the kids” role as her supportive ex-husband. Langley, like other characters, bends and changes according to the needs of the scene but is always the hero. When the script needs her to be a determined leader, she won’t take no for an answer. When it needs her to be oppressed by those nasty Leicester professionals, she won’t say boo to a goose. (Similarly, Mark Addy’s archaeologist yo-yos between dismissive of Langley to affectionately supportive almost scene-to-scene.)

The Lost King wants to be a triumphal little-guy film, but actually it has an unpleasant air to it. It feels like a massive grudge being publicly settled. It belittles and ignores expertise, patience and research in favour of gut instinct and amateurism. It bizarrely paints its lead character as a mixture of oddball weirdo, genius and saintly crusader. It’s also neither dramatic nor funny (except accidentally). It’s a bad film.

The Theory of Everything (2014)

Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne bring to the screen the life of Stephen Hawking

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Stephen Hawking), Felicity Jones (Jane Hawking), Charlie Cox (Jonathan Jones), David Thewlis (Dennis Sciama), Simon McBurney (Frank Hawking), Emily Watson (Beryl Wilde), Maxine Peake (Elaine Mason), Harry Lloyd (Brian), Guy Oliver-Watts (George Wilde), Abigail Cruttenden (Isobel Hawking), Christian McKay (Roger Penrose), Enzo Cilenti (Kip Thorne)

If you want a story of a triumph over adversity, there are few where adversity was faced off so successfully and publicly than the life of Stephen Hawking. Diagnosed with motor-neurone disease while still a postgraduate, Hawing defied the diagnosis that gave him little more than a few years to live, to shape a life and career that would have a profound impact on the world and make him probably the most famous scientist alive. Not bad for a man who spent a large part of his life confined to a wheelchair, only able to communicate through a synthesised computer voice.

But his life was not just a story where he was the only character. Many of his accomplishments came about because of the unflagging support of his wife Jane. This film takes as its source the book Jane wrote about their life together. And while it arguably sugar-coats or plays down some of the more uncomfortable or divisive elements of their marriage (a marriage that was eventually to end in divorce and several years where they did not speak), it also serves as a warm tribute to the many years they spent together where their support for each other was total and offered with no agenda or demands.

Here in James Marsh’s inventive and well-made film, which manages to more-or-less transcend its “movie of the week” roots, Hawking and Jane are played by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in performances that scooped an Oscar and a nomination respectively. Both are deserved, as these are rich, dedicated and empathetic performances, crammed with admiration for their subjects. It all fits perfectly well in Marsh’s moving if (at times) rather conventional film, which he directs with a lack of flash and plenty of heart.

It’s a film that sometimes avoids delving too deeply into the emotional heartlands of its lead characters, and the frequently messy situations that life throws you into (the end of this relationship comes with a remarkably calm sadness, which contrasts heavily with the furious argument Jane describes in her book). It’s also a film that has a very clear agenda of framing Jane as a near saint in her devotion and patience, and Stephen as a brave soul with a superhuman perseverance and regard for his wife. So the introduction of choir leader Jonathan Jones (played with a sweet charm by Charlie Cox) into their domestic life as a surrogate father to the Hawking children and friend to Jane (very definitely not a lover, the film is eager to make clear) is very much something accepted by both without a hint of doubt or recrimination. Similarly, Hawking’s later divorce of Jane is set in a context of “setting her free” rather than the more (allegedly) definitive break it was in real life.

Real life, you suspect, was messier than this. The film does mine some excellent emotional honesty from Jane’s decision to marry Stephen being, at least partly, based on her belief that this man she loves only has a few years to live. From the start she doesn’t anticipate signing up for a lifetime of providing care and abandoning her own aspirations to support Stephen’s (the film makes no real mention of her own dreams of becoming a translator) – but Jane does so with a decided willingness and sense of duty. Similarly, Stephen does not anticipate a life essentially trapped in a wheelchair – finally speechless – and the film allows beats of frustration from him, alongside the determination to not let these problems prevent him from achieving his potential.

The film revolves around Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Hawking. Needless to say it’s a technical marvel, a stunning accomplishment not only in its physical mastery (especially as it was all shot out of sequence, so in each scene Redmayne needed to carefully map how far the symptoms had progressed) and commitment, but also in its searing emotionality. Hawking’s brightness, his bashful playfulness, his intelligence and sense of cheeky charm are all there – and they’re later married with a pained, just-controlled bitterness mixed with stern mouthed resentment and gutsy determination to deal with the hand he has been given. Redmayne’s performance is a superb capturing of the all-consuming feelings of being betrayed by your own body, of no longer being the master of your own frame and being forced to adjust your plans and expectations to meet the limits nature has put on you.

Felicity Jones is equally good in a superbly heartfelt performance as Jane, a woman who gifts Stephen the determination and will to see past the limits the disease places on him. But it’s also a performance that acknowledges the draining burden of having to support someone this ill, of having to constantly be the strong member of the marriage, the one who must always be as ready to save her husband from choking at dinner as she must be to drop everything and fly across Europe to take life-saving medical decisions about him. Jones’ performance never slips into self-pity, but mines a rich vein of willing sacrifice powered by love.

Marsh’s film is largely unflinching around the everyday miseries and sorrow of the terminally ill and restrictingly disabled. We are confronted in every scene with the limits that Hawking’s body places upon him, from deteriorating handwriting and clumsiness to the loss of all speech and movement. This progression is presented with a detail uncoloured by maudlin sentimentality. Doctors are sympathetic but bluntly clear about the dangers and risks of treatment, each adversity is met with a quiet determination to carry on.

The Theory of Everything is a heart-warming watch – and features two superb performances. The portrait of a marriage that works, for the most part of their lives together, despite all obstacles is inspiring. While the film glosses over well-publicised issues over the end of the relationship – and perhaps downplays the emotional strains on both towards its end – it still succeeds in making a largely unsentimental picture of a genius who overcame all, and the brave woman who gave him the dedication he needed to do it.

The Wife (2018)

Glenn Close is the supportive but perhaps secretly resentful Wife of novelist Jonathan Pryce

Director: Björn Runge

Cast: Glenn Close (Joan Castleman), Jonathan Pryce (Joseph Castleman), Christian Slater (Nathaniel Bone), Max Irons (David Castleman), Annie Starke (Young Joan Castleman), Harry Lloyd (Young Joseph Castleman), Elizabeth McGovern (Elaine Mozell)

The old cliché used to be: behind every successful man, there’s a woman. The Wife explores just such a woman – and uses this story for a brilliantly structured, tightly written exploration of the tensions and sacrifices that underpin a partnership (and relationship) where the man is the sole public figure. In 1992, Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is a hugely successful novelist, being honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Standing beside him at all times is his wife Joan (Glenn Close), silent, supportive, taking care of all her husband’s needs. But as her husband is surrounded by praise and flattery, has her patience finally begun to snap?

Much of the attention for The Wife has focused on Glenn Close’s performance as Joan. And while her performance is superb, there is much more to this film than that. This is a well written, brilliantly acted, carefully shot relationship drama that manages to explore interesting details about how sexism, gender expectations and the patriarchy turn some brilliant, intelligent and gifted women into ciphers who must hide their skills under a bushel. The Wife is an engrossing, small scale drama that leaves you with a lot to think about.

Runge’s camera is slow and subtle, carefully zooming into parts of the scene that don’t seem at first to be central, but are revealed to be so. Many of these moments centre around Joan, a woman quietly at the edge of scenes, ignored by people, responding only when required. She calmly follows her husband’s lead, while quietly tending his needs (reminding him of appointments, making sure he takes his medicine, apologising for his abruptness).

This sort of framing requires a lot of quiet, “reaction” acting from Close – and she excels at this. Close’s performance is a masterclass in subtlety, her face a mask of micro-reactions that leave the viewer guessing at all times exactly what she is feeling about all of the events she witnesses. No scene covers this better than when she listens in on the line as her husband is informed of his Nobel prize – her face slowly, carefully, unreadably changes from delight and pride to something far more equivocal, her face frozen in a look of – well is it anger, horror, frustration? It’s impossible to tell. After that, the entire film is a study in interpreting the exact feelings this woman has for the behaviour of, and praise for, her husband. What does she feel about this? What does she really think? How far does loyalty to her husband stretch?

Muck-raking, sensationalist would-be Castleman biographer Nathaniel Bone (a wonderfully sleazy Christian Slater) has a good idea that there is a lot of anger there – and gambles in a series of offers and interjections that Joan’s loyalty only stretches so far. How far is she responsible for the literary success of her husband? Flashbacks carefully woven into the film show in the early sixties the young Joan (played very well by Close’s real life daughter Annie Starke) as a promising literary writer who falls under the influence of her charismatic professor, young Joe (Harry Lloyd a slightly awkward fit as the arrogant bohemian writer). In the boorish, Mad Men-ish 60s, Joan feels her chance of being recognised as a writer in her own right is close to zero – indeed she’s told to forget it altogether by a bitter former alumna of her Ivy League college, played archly by Elizabeth McGovern – so decides hitching her star to Joe, a promising potential author, seems the best option.

But how much of that promise can Joe actively achieve? And how much of a literary as well as a personal partnership is this marriage? And has Joe lost all track of this? It’s easy to overlook how essential Jonathan Pryce is to the success of this film, but his Joe is a wonderful creation, a bombastic, larger-than-life, selfish even slightly childish figure, everyone’s idea of the great artist, living the cliché of constant praise and a series of seductions. Pryce’s Joe is a domineeringly unattractive figure who slowly reveals his own emotional fragility wrapped in dependency – and the scenes with him and Close (that take up much of the movie) first hum with unspoken tensions and then later throb with the cathartic release of these feelings.

Those scenes when they come – and you can tell they’re coming from the start – are fantastic. Close is on the top of her game here, utterly believable as a woman who over the course of a few days slowly begins to question every decision she has ever made in her life. What Close does so brilliantly though is to show the balance, the lack of certainty, the mixed feelings she has – that people who in some way infuriate her, also provoke great love in her. Pryce is just as fabulous as her equally aggrieved husband. There are moments in these late scenes that tip into melodrama and cliché – but the general thrust of the scenes is so strong, you feel it gets away with it.

Runge has directed a marvellous low-key piece of work that feels like it would make an excellent play. It raises questions on the place of women in the 20th century – and the film’s setting is crucial, as a Joan growing up 10 years later might well have had a very different life – and the film has a brilliant eye for the everyday sexism and patronising assumptions made by people about the wives of ‘great men’. Powered with two brilliant central performances, this film deserves to be seen as something much more than just Close’s vehicle to possible (but sadly not to be) Oscar glory.

Anthropoid (2016)

Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy plan to remove The Butcher of Prague

Director: Sean Ellis

Cast: Cillian Murphy (Jozef Gabčík), Jamie Dornan (Jan Kubiš), Anna Geislerová (Lenka Fafková), Harry Lloyd (Adolf Opálka), Toby Jones (Jan Zelenka-Hajský), Charlotte Le Bon (Marie Kovárníková), Alena Mihulová (Mrs Moravcová), Bill Milner (Ata Moravec), Vaclav Neuzil (Josef Valcik), Andrej Polak (Jaroslav Svarc), Sam Keeley (Josef Bublík)

Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the SD, Reichs-Protector of Bohemia and Bavaria (the new German name for Czechoslovakia) and the architect of the Final Solution, was the only leader of the Nazi party to be assassinated by Allied forces during the Second World War. In revenge for his death, German soldiers destroyed the town of Lodz, executing the entire adult male population and sending the rest of the population to concentration camps. The reprisals eventually numbered over 5,000 people.

This film covers the build-up and planning of the assassination (code-named Operation Anthropoid), the assassination itself and the eventual fates of the assassins. It begins with Jozef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) and Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) parachuting into Czechoslovakia, with orders to plan and execute the assassination of Heydrich. With the assassination at the half way point of the film, the second half then focuses on the immediate aftermath and the fates of those involved.

Anthropoid was a box-office disappointment when released. Personally I think a large part of this was connected to its terrible title. Anthropoidis a word that means nothing to people watching and gives you no idea what the film is about – it sounds more like a sci-fi film than anything else. It’s also a film without big-name stars, with a fantastically downer ending, and about an event many people have not heard of. It’s a shame though, as this deserved an audience.

It’s a tense, tightly structured film, sharply directed, that has events as its primary momentum over character. The characters in the film are primarily defined by their purpose within the plot. Saying that, there is scope allowed for characterisation. Cillian Murphy’s Gabčík begins the film as a man who believes himself willing to sacrifice anything for the cause. However, when the losses begin to happen, he is the man who most quickly succumbs to anger and sentiment. Conversely Jamie Dornan’s Kubiš begins as hesitant about the taking of lives, but becomes the most effective soldier among the group.

The film is actually fairly even-handed in its portrayal of the resistance members, not afraid of showing that they were not always a unified group willingly sharing a purpose. Many of the members of the resistance are hesitant about the effect the plan will have on their already decimated ranks. Others, such as Harry Lloyd’s Opálka seem almost obsessively dedicated to their duties as soldiers, at the expense of any other considerations. Even the eventual traitor is shown to be motivated at least partly by fear for the fate of his family. Similarly the film is not afraid to show the somewhat haphazard planning of the assassination, or its bungled execution (expertly reconstructed).

There is a definite mood shift after the assassination. If the first half of the film is a subdued men-on-a-mission tale, the second half is a brutal depiction of the onslaught of retribution. Ellis’ direction is crisp, taught and unflinchingly truthful, recording the actions of the police state with honesty and no sensationalism – from doors kicked in to some brutal torture scenes (the torture of one character in particular is tough to watch, without ever being graphic). The final stand of the assassins in the church is similarly brilliantly filmed and difficult to watch, a blazingly tight and bloody display of gunplay and violence, in which doomed men determine to take as many of the enemy down with them as they can.

However, as it goes on, I think the film becomes so seduced by the courage and bravery of its characters, that it stops questioning the value of their actions. From the start, many members of the Czech resistance are shown to question the worth of the plan when balanced against likely reprisals. This is an issue the film loses sight of in its second half. It is not completely surprising, considering the immense bravery of the assassins during their final stand, that the film doesn’t wish to undermine this by probing the reasoning behind their actions. But it’s a point that needs to be made and the film, in the end, dodges it: was killing Heydrich worth sacrificing 5,000 innocent Czechs in return? I’d argue probably not. The allies at the time certainly decided it wasn’t – no other attempt would be made to assassinate a leading Nazi during the war – and the question needed to be asked more in this film. Killing Heydrich didn’t stop anything he had set in motion and had little overall impact on the outcome of the war.

Instead the film ends on a note of optimism, stressing Heydrich’s vileness and the fact that the successful assassination made the Czechs more recognised as members of the Allies. It is understandable, considering the tragic ending of the film, that its makers didn’t want to end with any doubt about the righteousness or value of their actions. And there is no doubt that Heydrich deserved his fate. But the film avoids truly addressing the collateral damage to the Czech population. It’s a single question mark over other an otherwise gripping and tense dramatisation.