Judi blithely summons the spirit of... RENTAGHOST!
The Dame hams it up in sumptuous remake of Coward’s classic
WHEN Noel Coward, whose play Blithe Spirit had been a smash hit in the West End, saw David Lean’s film version in 1945, he crushed Lean by saying — and I paraphrase only slightly — ‘You’ve just mucked up the best thing I ever wrote.’
Blithe Spirit is about spiritualism, about raising the dead, and I fear that were Coward’s own ghost to see Edward Hall’s remake, his silk cravat might levitate from his neck and tighten around Hall’s.
It is a jolly film and the Art Deco backdrops are truly ravishing, but it is played as broad knockabout comedy in a way that obliterates the cleverness of the original concept.
The charge against Lean, whose film starring Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford was subtle by comparison, was that he was a wholly serious man of cinema, lacking the deft comic touch required to do proper justice to Coward’s play.
Hall, by contrast, is a theatre director of considerable pedigree but he doesn’t quite work it out, either. On stage, Blithe Spirit is a farce — but a smart one. Here, it more often feels like Rentaghost, the children’s TV series of blessed memory, for grown-ups.
Nevertheless, it couldn’t look more sumptuous and it stars Dame Judi Dench in the old Rutherford role as nutty medium Madame Arcati, so there are at least two sound reasons for seeing it.
Moreover, Dan Stevens, while no Rex Harrison, has successfully exorcised the flickering spirit of Downton Abbey’s dull old Matthew Crawley to become an adroit light comedian. Now Hugh Grant has moved on to play murderous fiends, there’s a vacancy for a devilishly handsome, frightfully English matinee-idol type with sharp comic timing. Stevens might well be the anointed one.
Here he plays Charles Condomine, a novelist whose desperate dose of writer’s block has — nudge, nudge — also stopped him producing exclamation marks in the bedroom. Both his career and his five-year marriage to Ruth (Isla Fisher) are in a slump.
When he invites famous spiritualist Madame Arcati to preside over a séance at his home, he is looking only for literary inspiration. Instead, she accidentally raises the ghost of his dead wife Elvira (Leslie Mann), who, jealous of his relationship with Ruth, begins to cause all sorts of mischief, not least by reminding Charles how much fun she was, and how sexy, before her untimely demise (breaking her neck, while riding in a point-to-point).
Wisely, Hall and his screenwriters have retained the story’s period setting, enabling the designers to have an Art Deco field day.
Less wisely, they do too much recycling of the one-note gag that only Charles can see Elvira, so when he talks to her he appears to be addressing someone else, leading to repeated misunderstandings. Also, Fisher is miscast. Ruth is at least as pretty ( and almost as flighty) as Elvira, which isn’t the idea at all. But if you accept this version of Blithe Spirit as a shallow, rather hammy romp, then it will reward the investment of time, which after all is one commodity many of us currently have in abundance. On which note, while Lean’s film three- quarters of a century ago was well received, on the whole, Coward wasn’t the only person who disliked it. Others felt it was disrespectful to treat death with levity at a time of war. Maybe the same applies while a pandemic rages, but it could be just the sort of undemanding escapism you’re looking for.
THERE is nothing undemanding about Ham On Rye, which as it happens offers decidedly less ham than Blithe Spirit. On the contrary, writer- director Tyler Taormina’s debut feature requires an awful lot of patient commitment on its audience’s part.
That said, Taormina gives a bold and ingenious twist to a cinematic staple: the U.S. coming- of-age movie. You can think back to Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993), or to George Lucas’s American Graffiti 20 years earlier, and imagine them in the hands of David Lynch or even Stanley Kubrick.
Alternatively, you can watch Ham On Rye for yourself and either fully embrace its faintly surreal air of menace or quickly recognise that it’s going nowhere, even at a concise 85 minutes.
It takes place on the night of a dance at a diner called Monty’s, a kind of prom marking the last day of high school, for which the unnamed town’s teenagers dress up and pair off in a ritual as rigid as in any Jane Austen adaptation. Insofar as the story has a centrepiece, that’s it . . . insofar as there’s any story at all.
Otherwise, the camera just flits from group to group, parodying more conventional coming-of-age movies and having a contemptuous cackle, too, at the clichés of middle-class American suburbia. It’s extremely strange but also strangely compelling.