A poison pen farce that’s a wicked waste of talent
Wicked Little Letters (15A, 100 minutes) Verdict: F is for feeble ))***
JUST over 100 years ago, the genteel Sussex town of Littlehampton was rocked to its core, not to mention its core values, by a barrage of vindictively obscene letters sent anonymously to respectable townsfolk.
‘You’re a sad, stinky bitch,’ declared one of the poison-pen letters, along with some rather more startling effing and blinding.
Eventually a likely culprit was arrested and a trial followed at Lewes Assizes. Most major newspapers sent reporters. Britain was a nation reeling from the Great War, only too delighted to be shocked by a tragi-comedy of provincial manners, was gripped.
And so to last week’s London premiere of Wicked Little Letters, starring Olivia Colman, our own Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall and, among a top-notch supporting cast, Eileen Atkins.
It was an occasion both glitzy and profane. The latter, because Colman and the other stars interviewed beforehand, followed by director Thea Sharrock, all swore like troopers. This was a huge in-joke, with which most of the audience cheerfully played along, laughing fit to burst at each obscenity. But heavens, it became tiresome.
And the film is the same: an extended ‘isn’t swearing funny’ joke that glides complacently and wastefully over all the social nuances that a better picture might have addressed.
Colman plays Edith Swan, an uptight, church-going spinster who still lives with her overbearing father (Spall) and pious mother (Gemma Jones).
Rose Gooding (Buckley), an exuberant Irish woman, fiery and foul-mouthed but fun, lives next door with her daughter (Alisha Weir, the engaging young Dubliner who played the title role in 2022’s wonderful Matilda).
Rose also has a black livein boyfriend (Malachi Kirby), which is where Wicked Little Letters diverges from the otherwise mostly true story it tells.
The film depicts Littlehampton in 1920 as a thoroughly multiethnic community — England now, not England then — yet the ugly spectre of racism never appears. This is because the ethnicity of black and Asian actors is not intended even to be recognised, according to the principles of so-called ‘colourblind casting’.
But here those principles (wholly admirable to some, shriekingly ‘woke’ to others) rather trip themselves up, because these were real people, who couldn’t have been anything other than white. Indeed, the whole story depends on a prim English seaside town being so monocultural in the 1920s that an Irishwoman might be considered a dangerous outsider.
At any rate, it’s not long before the police accuse Rose of, in a manner of speaking, being the person who put the p*** in ‘epistle’. She and Edith had been friends, which we are shown in flashback, but now Edith and others seem sure that Rose is the source of the abuse.
Enter the county’s first female police constable, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), who is not convinced, especially once she finds that Rose’s handwriting does not match the letters. As for the person whose writing conspicuously does match, it’s never much of a secret but I won’t issue any spoilers here. Besides, the film is in many ways its own spoiler.
The screenplay is by comic actor and writer Jonny Sweet, and hats off to him for unearthing this little-remembered scandal in the first place. But he and Sharrock somehow, despite all the extravagant swearing, contrive to give their film the air of a children’s teatime serial, compounded by Isobel WallerBridge’s insistently jaunty score.
WITH the stark exception of Gladys, the cops are bumbling-idiot caricatures; indeed it’s all but impossible to believe in a single peripheral character. Some amateur sleuthing by a trio of stalwarts from the Christian Women’s Whist Drive, who trail the actual culprit around town, belongs if not to children’s television then perhaps to a Carry On film. They could have called it Carry On Cursing.
Yet the irony is that by playing so overtly for laughs, Wicked Little Letters just isn’t funny. The trailer promised so much; the film delivers so little.
With a cleverer, wittier script it could have been a gem, although frankly it would have needed better acting. Bizarrely, given how brilliant he normally is, Spall hams and gurns his way through the entire picture, and Colman, just as unusually, isn’t a whole lot better. In the film’s own vernacular, what a ******* waste.
■ Wicked Little Letters is in cinemas now.