A little light weeding
A Downton star and Tom Wilkinson make for a garden variety odd couple.
Bella Brown (Jessica Brown Findlay, who played the fiercely political Lady Sybil Crawley in Downton Abbey) is the “oddest of oddballs”, the introductory narration to this film tells us. Cue a tour of her house, with its neatly arranged toothbrushes (one for each day of the week) and stacks of
canned vegetables uniformly arranged in her pantry.
Barely a hint of dust mars the mantelpiece, and when she leaves home each morning for her job as a librarian – dressed like a Victorian midwife crossed with a plague-victim corpse collector – she checks six or seven times to see if her door is locked. She’s not so much oddball, then, as someone with a crippling case of obsessivecompulsive disorder.
Brown’s rigid life is shattered by a comically tyrannical landlord who threatens her with eviction for the chaotic state of the garden that he describes as an “unmitigated eco-apocalypse”. With the aid of cantankerous but green-fingered neighbour Alfie (Tom Wilkinson), she must restore the patch to its natural splendour and discover the redemptive power of alfresco living.
I struggle to recall any film in the annals of twee cinema so incorrigibly cutesy, quirky and quaint as This Beautiful Fantastic. Even Amélie, say, or ( 500) Days of Summer had a bitter undertone to counter the cloying saccharine.
Wilkinson provides something of this flavour with his acerbic invective. Sample exchange: “What do you do when you’re not murdering plants?” he asks Bella. “I was just trying to tidy up a bit,” she huffs defensively. “I think that’s what Hitler said about Europe,” he scoffs.
These withering put-downs prompt the tempting idea of a picture in which Wilkinson wanders around being wittily mean to people, but of course, this story demands that he soften and turn drippy while teaching his landscaping protégée about the wonders of hydrangeas.
Every fibre of my cynical being demands that I passionately hate This Beautiful Fantastic from its daft title to its conveniently bow-tied resolution. And yet something about the whole ridiculous exercise sticks. Let’s put it down to Brown Findlay, whose adorableness spreads everywhere like a vine.
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