Steve Coogan – Movie Musings

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.

Judi Dench and Steve Coogan go on a road trip into the past in Philomena

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Judi Dench (Philomena Lee), Steve Coogan (Martin Sixsmith), Michelle Fairley (Sally Mitchell), Barbara Jefford (Sister Hildegarde), Anna Maxwell Martin (Jane), Mare Winningham (Mare), Sophie Kennedy Clarke (Young Philomena), Kate Fleetwood (Young Sister Hildegarde), Sean Mahon (Michael Hess), Peter Hermann (Pete Olsen)

Describing Philomena as a sort of odd-couple buddy road movie with a heart seems like exactly the sort of trite journalistic spin that Coogan’s Martin Sixsmith spends most of the film deriding. But it’s a pretty accurate label, in this heartfelt and entertaining film that mixes looking at Irish church scandals, with both the shallowness and promise of journalism and a heartfelt meditation on the virtues of forgiveness.

Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), a former government spin doctor, dismissed from his position is struggling to find a new purpose for himself in writing and journalism. After a chance meeting with waitress Jane (Anna Maxwell Martin) at his editor’s New Year party, he is introduced to her mother Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) an Irish woman whose son was given up for adoption by the convent Philomena had been sent to over 50 years ago. She has spent years trying to find him, but made no progress. At first Sixsmith is dismissive of this human interest story, but slowly begins to invest in the story, as he and Philomena travel to the US to try and find her lost son.

Philomena is a film that doesn’t pull punches in its moral outrage at the decisions made by convents in Ireland in the 1950s to separate ‘sinful’ mothers from their children and find them new homes. The distress of the young Philomena is clear, and the steps the church took to put barriers in the path of helping these children and their parents reuniting (from burning records to bare-faced lies) are as infuriating as their moral superiority is outrageous in its hypocritical cruelty. But it’s not a film that wants to make a simple or political point.

If the film has a problem with religion, it’s with the institutions that run it, not the faith itself. For all her ill-treatment, Philomena’s faith has been unshaken by all that has happened to her, and she like the film can separate the flaws of individuals from the principle of faith. The film may take aim at the Catholic church for making people feel sex is something dirty and shameful, but it won’t turn its guns on God himself. Near the film’s conclusion, Philomena even rebukes Martin for his rage (on her behalf) against the nuns who treated her wrongly, pointing out that she is the victim not him and that how she chooses to respond to it is her business – and if she chooses reconciliation and forgiveness that is her choice.

It’s a part of the films light and shade, very well drawn out in Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope’s script that mixes serious reflections on such matters as truth, faith and forgiveness with some good jokes and entertaining banter. The film deviates considerably from the true story it was based on – Philomena in real life never went to America – but in doing so it unlocks the story as a filmic narrative. The odd mother-son type relationship that the distant and cynical Sixsmith and the warm and engaging Philomena develop as they travel America gives the film heart, not least as Philomena constantly surprises Sixsmith with her worldliness and socially moderate views. The two characters end up bonding in a way that is straight out of a Movie-101 but it stills very real and touching.

A lot of that works so well because of the chemistry between the two leads. Judi Dench is just about perfect as Philomena. Dench expertly mixes the twinkle and charm of Philomena’s incessant Irish patter and capacity for small-talk (and fascination with everything from Mills and Boon to hotel toiletry) with a devastating emotional vulnerability and aching pain at the loss of her child, which has clearly been part of her life for so long she has learned to a certain degree to live with it. In one of her greatest screen performances, Dench will have you laughing one minute then spin on a sixpence with genuine emotional devastation or a capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation that seems impossible after what she has been through. The film builds real affection for both her old-world politeness charm and Irish loquaciousness and her emotional strength of character.

She’s well matched with Coogan, who uses his deadpan archness to excellent effect as Sixsmith. Although the film is called Philomena, it’s Sixsmith who represents the audience, and it’s his expectation of being emotionally manipulated by the story that we share at the start – and his growing investment in it that we also share. Coogan keeps the details very small, but along with a skill at delivering deadpan one-lines, he also has a considerable capacity for moral outrage and genuineness (well hidden) that serves the film very well. Sixsmith starts the story as self-pitying, supercilious and interested only in selling the story – the fact he ends it so bound up in rage at the treatment of Philomena, is a testament to Coogan’s skills for subtle character development.

Frears’ directs with a small-scale sharpness of camera and lack of flash that has been at the foreground of so many of his films, letting the focus lie on story and character. The road movie sequences that this film highlights so much are little triumphs of small-scale character story-telling, and while the jokes they feature – and even the emotional points they make – are familiar they are delivered with such grace and feeling they nearly all land.

Perhaps reflecting Coogan’s experience with the British media, it’s Fleet Street that emerges as the most 2D here, with Michelle Fairley playing a tabloid editor interested only in the story, delighting in tragic twists as they will make for even better headlines. It’s the film’s only real crudeness, but packaged within such a well-acted and richly entertaining whole, that makes a strong case for forgiveness not vindication being the true path to inner peace, it doesn’t seem to matter.