Directed by Nicholas Hytner | Written by Alan Bennett and Stephen Beresford | 113 min | ▲▲1/2
The word that comes to mind when perusing these filmmakers’ body of work is “distinguished.” Hytner has spent much of his time recently filming UK National Theatre productions. His last feature was a decade ago, The Lady In The Van, but he’s probably still best known for his first couple of efforts, The Madness of King George and The Crucible. Bennett is a theatre legend and Hytner’s frequent collaborator, and a multiple BAFTA and Tony award winner, while Beresford is a writer for film and TV, having co-scripted Tolkien and that excellent story of queer and working class activism, Pride.
This time they’re come up with material that’s otherwise almost entirely migrated to television — you could find half a dozen series just like it on Britbox, PBS, or CBC Gem. That’s no comment on the quality of the work, necessarily, more where the genre seems most comfortable. This is a somber, earnest story of a small Yorkshire community in 1916, scarred by war and gathered around its choral, which has lost its best male voices to the front, forcing the conscription of a new choir master and a group of teenage boys.
That master’s name is Guthrie, played by Ralph Fiennes, who has recently returned to the UK from Germany, where he says the culture respects music. Consider all those German composers, from Beethoven to Bach.
But now it’s wartime, and Guthrie is determined to repeople this small town choral. It turns out a few young men and young women have the voices he’s looking for — cue their perspective on life, war, and interest in romance. They include performers such as Oliver Briscombe, Thomas Howes, Amara Okereke, and Emily Fairn, with the established, elder generation including thesps like Alun Armstrong, Mark Addy, and Roger Allam.
The care to era-specific details is lovely, as is the leisurely, low-stakes of it all. Yes, the teenagers will soon be going to war once they’re 18 — which might have had more impact if they’d cast actual teens and not a bunch of people obviously in their 20s — but this could almost be called a hangout movie for its looseness around plot. It turns out Guthrie also has a personal connection to the war he won’t speak of to anyone, but that subplot is swiftly dropped.
What will the choral sing? It turns out, work from the greatest living English composer of the age, Edward Elgar (played with typical brio by Simon Russell Beale), but then they plan to make changes to the work and hire the a young war veteran who’s lost his arm (Jacob Dudman) in a role intended for an older man.
The film pushes against the prejudices of the age, but without much force, and the racism that would’ve undoubtably been present in an all-white village with one Black family never rears its ugly head — no one even blinks and eye at a possible interracial romance — which seems especially implausible. The final production of Elgar’s work leans toward full-on choral theatre, which is pretty unlikely. A little more humour would’ve been welcome, too.
All said, this is a diverting, and yes, distinguished visit to the past, without being an especially dramatic one.
