LITTLE TERRORS AND BIG LAUGHS
What We Did On Our Holiday (12A) Verdict: It’s Outnumbered: The Movie Maps To The Stars (18) Verdict: Twisted Hollywood satire
AHARASSED middle- aged couple, trying and mostly failing to corral their three lively young children. If that sounds strikingly like the premise for the BBC sitcom Outnumbered, then it’s because What We Did On Our Holiday is essentially Outnumbered, the movie, written and directed by the TV show’s creators Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, and given two properly grown-up tweaks for the big screen.
I can divulge only one of them here. Unlike their telly counterparts, these parents, Doug and Abi, played by David Tennant and Rosamund Pike, are separated and on the brink of divorce.
But first they must take the kids, Lottie (emilia Jones), Mickey (Bobby Smalldridge) and Jess (Harriet Turnbull), aged about ten, eight and six, to Scotland, where Doug’s pompous, socialclimbing brother Gavin (Ben Miller), a wealthy financier, is about to throw a lavish 75th birthday party for their terminally ill father Gordy (Billy Connolly).
Gordy, less than enthusiastic about the bash, is a former professional footballer who in his one and only international appearance found the back of the net. Alas, it was Scotland’s net. The film itself scores a few own goals, too. The dialogue is semi-improvised, which can — and here, sometimes does — result in an uneasy lurch between script and spontaneity. Gordy, for example, is ‘ grandad’ throughout, yet Jess suddenly starts calling him ‘grandpa’. Why this wasn’t corrected, I have no idea.
But it is not an overwhelming problem. There is much else to enjoy, not least the glorious Scottish setting. Not only is this Outnumbered, the movie, it is also an extended advertisement for the north-west Highlands.
I have seen the film twice, and the first time I sat next to a woman from Visit Scotland, who could hardly contain her pride. By the end, if she could have j ammed on a Tam o’ Shanter and Strip-the-Willowed her way out of the cinema and into the street, she would have.
Happily for me, I love Scotland and I loved Outnumbered, especially in the early years, before its little cuties became great, glowering teenage hulks, about as cute as acne. So for all the film’s faults, another of which is a rather relentlessly calculating charm, I enjoyed it from the start.
It begins with Abi and Doug squabbling as they pack the car outside their London home, and intermittently trying to explain to the three children that although they will both remain loving parents, they no longer love each other.
Their trials are compounded, as car journeys north from London always are, by horrible tailbacks on the M1.
Even ‘Is this Scotland?’ ‘No darling, this is Watford.’
as their characters bicker on the great trek north, Tennant and Pike are as appealing as ever, but it is the child actors who must drive the picture, which they do. They are all talented and delightful, and little Harriet Turnbull, somehow both knowing and guileless as Jess, who declares her best friend to be a house brick, will remind Outnumbered fans of that show’s Ramona Marquez, back in her edibly adorable years.
Like Outnumbered, the film relies to a l arge extent on The Funny
Things Children Say, but there is poignancy, too. Lottie is keeping a diary, mainly so that she can record the fibs she has to tell to keep her parents’ marital problems from the rest of the family.
In stuffy Gavin’s case, that’s not hard. He is too busy planning the party, and bullying his sensitive son and timorous wife (splendidly played by the decidedly un-timorous Amelia Bullmore). But there’s no pulling even tartan wool over old Gordy’s eyes.
Connolly is simply lovely in this role, and the rapport between him and the kids seems real, as on the set perhaps it was. It is their special relationship with him that is at the heart of The Twist That Cannot Be Divulged, and which lands the family in the middle of a global media circus that is not always entirely credible, but never less than entertaining.
The film’s engaging whimsy more than makes up for the occasional misjudgments. Moreover, which of us can take issue with the central joke — that adults are disconcertingly capable of behaving like children, and children like adults?
THERE is a streak of that too in Maps To The Stars, David Cronenberg’s gloriously twisted satire on the mores of Hollywood.
The family in What We Did On Our Holiday might be dysfunctional, but there’s no dysfunction like showbusiness dysfunction, and Cronenberg and writer Bruce Wagner, hit it squarely between the eyes, discharging both barrels. It’s hard to decide which is the film’s sickest, most depraved character, but it might well be Benjie Weiss, a teen star who was earning $300,000 a week aged nine, and is brilliantly played by Evan Bird as a hybrid of Justin Bieber and Caligula.
Benjie lives with his monstrous father, Stafford (John Cusack), a self-help guru, and fragile mother, Cristina (Olivia Williams). The couple nurse a particularly shameful secret, and it’s not even that Benjie has an older sister, who was committed to an institution after burning down the family home.
Meanwhile Stafford is treating a washedup actress, Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore, making What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? look like The Partridge Family), whose neuroses know no bounds.
Havana is desperate for a chance to play the part of her own dead, movie-star mother in a forthcoming film. That’s the mother by whom she was sexually abused and is now haunted. It is duly rather wonderfully mischievous of Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Debbie Reynolds, to play herself in a part as Havana’s friend.
When Havana needs a new assistant, or ‘ chore whore’, Carrie fixes her up with Agatha, played with creepy intensity by Mia Wasikowska.
Wagner’s screenplay is about as unrestrained as it could be, making other Hollywood satires up to and including Robert Altman’s The Player, seem affectionately tame by c omparison. This is a Tinseltown scarred by incest, arson, drug-abuse, raging jealousy, anti-Semitism, vengeful ghouls, even self-immolation.
It is a cesspool of amorality and it doesn’t even look like fun. But Wagner and Cronenberg have great fun sending it up, the former by all accounts using some of the insights he once gleaned as a Beverly Hills limousine driver.
Hence the presence, too, of Robert Pattinson as a limo driver, who doesn’t get much screen time, but does get one of the best of many great lines designed to rattle Hollywood’s shaky moral foundations. He is thinking about converting to Scientology, he says, but ‘just as a career move’.