A cocksure Guy Ritchie caper – lock, stock and barrel
The Gentlemen (Netflix) is the first TV series from Guy Ritchie, but it takes a little while for the Guy Ritchie-ness to kick in. It begins with a chap named Eddie being summoned back from his job with the UN peacekeeping force to be at his dying father’s bedside. That bedside is in a very grand house, because Eddie’s father is the 12th Duke of Halstead. Also there are: Freddy, the cocaine-addled firstborn son; an aloof younger sister nicknamed Chuckles; and Joely Richardson as the haughty Duchess. So far, so Saltburn.
At the reading of the will, to everyone’s surprise, the Duke bypasses his elder son and leaves his estate to Eddie. “I’ve been stabbed in the heart. I’ve been London Bridge-d. I’ve been f----d in the face,” Freddy rails, in a meltdown shot in slow-motion. Ah, here we are. We’ve been Ritchie-d.
Since his 1998 debut with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ritchie has worked to a particular style and set of characters – drug dealers, gangsters and Cockneys are his stock-in-trade, despite his own well-to-do background. The Gentlemen is a spin-off of sorts from Ritchie’s 2019 film of the same name, though they don’t seem to have much overlap. But it’s filled with cannabis farms and OTT accents and cartoon violence. Sample dialogue: “I know Tommy Dixon and his brother, The Gospel. Pair of drug-dealing Scousers that have got God on their side.” “Naughty?” “Naughty but not double naughty.” It’s as if Loaded magazine never folded.
The Ritchie flourishes are irritating – especially on-screen text cutely translating the drugs speak, so when a character offers “£4m sweetened with a bar’s worth of White Widow super cheese”, up pops the explainer that this refers to a million pounds’ worth of “rocket-fuelled marijuana”. But if you can get past this, it’s a fun caper.
Theo James (The White Lotus) is the straight man in the role of Eddie, albeit one who proves adept at navigating a new world of crime. Daniel Ings steals the show as the wild-eyed Freddy. The plotting plays second fiddle to the characters, who are all larger-than-life apart from the female lead (Kaya Scodelario), who introduces the men to each other while wearing a sexy beret.
Vinnie Jones is a gamekeeper on the Halstead estate who takes in injured foxes instead of culling them. Peter Serafinowicz is a Scouser in a tracksuit. Ray Winstone is a crime boss in an open prison which is so open that he can hold court in a tent like a Cockney maharajah, eating steak barbecued by his personal Japanese chef. Everyone seems to be having a whale of a time.
L(Sky Arts) is billed as “the incredible story of two remarkable women”, which is a bit hyperbolic, but it’s International Women’s Day so let’s be generous.
The pair – christened Susan and Elizabeth when they were born in the 1860s – lived in the shadow of their brothers, the poet William Butler Yeats and the artist Jack Butler Yeats, and their father, portraitist John Butler Yeats. That’s a lot of talent in one family. The sisters also pursued careers in the arts, Lily as an embroideress for William Morris and Lolly as an art teacher, but they still saw it as their duty to look after the men.
In the 1900s, they set up a press, Cuala, and an embroidery workshop, both of which trained and employed only women. This was trailblazing stuff, although the family ties no doubt helped: the press published William, and Jack contributed designs. But the women’s own creative endeavours were strikingly beautiful, such as the altar tapestries in a church in Dublin.
This guide to their lives is hosted by Imelda May, the Irish singer, whose approach is so unlike that of your usual documentary presenter that it is both refreshing and disconcerting. May is open when it comes to her passion for the sisters. “Oh my heart,” she whispers tearily, on seeing a rare photograph of Lolly in her later years.
The film is as much a celebration of Irishness as it is of women. Nor do the sisters fit into a neat box when it comes to the International Women’s Day tie-in – they would not have considered themselves feminists, one academic says. But Lily once poured out her frustrations in a letter: “The mistake with my life has been that I have not had a woman’s life, but an uncomfortable and unsatisfactory mixture of a man’s and a woman’s. Gone out all day earning my living, working like a man for a woman’s pay, then kept house… In my next incarnation, I hope I will be all woman and have a woman’s life.”
If the film feels slight at times, it does achieve its aim of highlighting the sisters’ work and showing us that the Yeats talent was not confined to its men.
The Gentlemen ★★★
The Forgotten Yeats Sisters ★★★