This year’s Full Monty bobs charmingly along
Swimming With Men
12A cert, 97 min ★★★★★ Dir Oliver Parker
Starring Rob Brydon, Charlotte Riley, Rupert Graves, Jim Carter, Daniel Mays, Nathaniel Parker, Thomas Turgoose, Jane Horrocks, Peter Coe, Adeel Akhtar, Steve Carroll
There’s a throwback quality to Swimming With Men, an ensemble Britcom that’s near-unthinkable without the success 20 years ago of The Full Monty. In place of Robert Carlyle ripping off his pants, here we get Rob Brydon as a depressed accountant, putting all cares of job and marriage aside while he treads water in goggles to complete a synchronised swimming team.
The eight Londoners involved, all shapes and sizes and ages, include one member who’s helpfully both brown and gay (a very affable Adeel Akhtar), but the diversity feels more shruggingly casual than calculated, and it’s their warmth and bonhomie that consistently lift the material.
Massively formulaic it may be, right down to the inescapable third-act contest abroad, but the film is further proof of what easy-going places Oliver Parker’s sets are. From An Ideal Husband to the St Trinian’s series, he’s built an underrated career on knowing the precise charm levels of his actors in most circumstances, and when a variation on their shtick could come in handy. (He even throws his brother Nathaniel a semi-villainous part as a smarmy local councillor.)
It’s the kind of film where you could easily struggle to remember any character’s name the next day, but ought to concede, moment to moment, what a good job Rupert Graves is doing in the Rupert Graves role (a dishy, regretful divorcé who thinks his best years are behind him); what a hard-to-impress asset Charlotte Riley is on the sidelines; and how well the film manages the potential problem of Jane Horrocks, modulating shrillness with sadness as a tense wife making a fretful move into local politics.
As human punchlines, Jim Carter and This is England’s Thomas Turgoose horsing around poolside get a lot of smiles: the failed attempts to flip Turgoose through the air as their crowning finale means watching him bellyflop repeatedly with a Turgoosian grimace. And that, I’m telling you, is droll. So is the moment in background blur when a clown at a children’s party gets pulled haplessly into a lido. Easy routines, sure, but the timing is crisp.
From top to bottom, it’s Brydon’s film, and his performance matches the modesty of the surroundings: rarely pushing too hard, he finds just the right groove as a browbeaten Everyman lacking spring in his step (or dash in his breaststroke). Like many of the best-loved British comedy leads, he seems to have tumbled into the position by accident, and here he finds himself: fronting a vehicle that shares with all these men the solid attitude of being middling and proud of it.