Movie Number 9 of 2024
The Movie: Wicked Little Letters
The Cinema: Hoyts Victoria Gardens
Stars: 4.5
More British fare is this film, and Wicked Little Letters is an absolute cracker. I mean it has one of the best British casts on the planet and it's based on a true story in the early 1920s, which has been buried until now. This is absolutely fabulous. And there is a hell of a lot of swearing. Even better.
The story starts in Littlehampton on the South Coast of England. Edith Swan (the inimitable Olivia Colman) has been receiving awful poison pen letters. From a seemingly good family, the spinster, who lives at home with her parents, menacing father Edward (Timothy Spall at his finest) and meek mother, Victoria (Gemma Jones) and it is after the 19th nasty letter that her father goes to the police.
The blame falls on the Swan's next-door neighbour, Rose Gooding, played by the spectacular Jessie Buckley. Rose is everything Edith is not. Loud, a little loose in her morals, lippy, Irish, outspoken and shacked up with a black man with her daughter Nancy (played by Alisha Weir of Matilda fame). Despite her apparent failings, Rose is trying... in many types of ways. As Edith says, they share a privy and a bath - and she wished she didn't.
Rose in taken in for questioning by the rather incompetent cops. It is only Female Police Officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) who sees the humungous holes in the case and starts to investigate the case against her superiors' wishes, because, of course, how could a woman work out what was going on.
Remember, this is taking place against a backdrop of the end of World War One where women got their first taste of freedom and the Suffragette movement. Edith has to pick her battles with the letters. And Rose ends up on remand for a while, before some of the locals (Joanna Scanlan, Eileen Atkins and Lolly Adefope) spring her and start to look at what really is going on.
I'll say no more so not to ruin the plot.
This is a glorious, riotous film. If you don't like swearing, don't go. But it's all in context.
Jonny Sweet's script is hilarious as much as it captures the times. In particular, Timothy Spall's character is brilliant as a man in charge of his family, ruling with an iron rod. Anjuna Varun's long-suffering policewoman, ("Make the tea, love..,") is a joy, but as always, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley steal the show.
Thea Sharrock's direction is wonderful as well, allowing the nuances of the story to shine through without leading the story into crassness - and sure, there is a bit of the rude and the expletives fly - you just don't expect them from crusty spinsters under the thumb of her father in 1920.
I think what I loved most about this film was the fact that everybody on set seems to be having the time of their lives.
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