These Dahls in despair are too darned wholesome
To Olivia (PG)
Verdict: Watchable, but flawed I Care A Lot (16+) Verdict: Black-as-pitch comedy
FORTY years ago, a made-forTV film called The Patricia Neal Story chronicled the aftermath of a series of devastating strokes suffered by the Oscar-winning American actress in 1965, and the uncompromising way she was cared for by her husband, author Roald Dahl.
Tough love might be the modern euphemism.
Two mighty stars of the silver screen, Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde, played Neal and Dahl then. Now, in To Olivia, it is the turn of a pair of smallscreen A-listers, Keeley Hawes and Hugh Bonneville, as the focus turns to an earlier episode in the couple’s life, devastating in a different way: the death, aged seven, of their firstborn child and the tragedy’s impact on their already brittle relationship.
John Hay’s film, informed by a biography of Neal, begins in November 1961. It is a year before Olivia dies of encephalitis, caused by measles, and with the help of a swooning score we are pitched straight into a picture-postcard Buckinghamshire of village duckponds and oldfashioned sweet shops, in which the Dahls live in genteel poverty.
Roald’s last book, James And The Giant Peach (dedicated to Olivia), didn’t sell very well and Patricia isn’t landing the roles she wants. There is friction between them but, confronted by her beauty and his twinklyeyed charm, it never seems to last.
Then Olivia (Darcey Ewart) falls ill and dies, sending Roald, the former fighter pilot, into a tailspin of despair.
OLIVIA was his favourite, and he doesn’t mind letting her younger sister Tessa (very sweetly played by Isabella Jonsson), know it. There is also a son, Theo, left brain-damaged after a taxi struck his pram in New York.
The marriage starts to disintegrate. The couple go to visit Roald’s old headmaster, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher, played as a crusty old fool by the late Geoffrey Palmer in his final screen role. The Dahls hope he might help them tackle their grief. He does nothing of the sort.
Then Patricia accepts a role in a Hollywood movie, Hud, and while Roald stays at home drowning in whisky and selfpity, takes the children off to los Angeles. They are put up in a handsome house that eagle-eyed audiences will recognise as Joldwynds, the modernist Surrey mansion in which the recent remake of Blithe Spirit was set. A computergenerated Pacific ocean sparkles in the background. Working on Hud with director
Martin Ritt (Conleth Hill) and co-star Paul Newman (Sam Heughan), Neal gets her actressy mojo back. Roald, meanwhile, accompanied only by a vision of his own boyhood self, has been working in his garden hut on a new book he decides to call Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.
He rediscovers his confidence, too, as well as his fatherly responsibilities. Success is just around the corner for both of them — an Academy Award for her, gigantic literary acclaim for him. Of her impending health crisis, there is no hint.
All of this is well and good, and never less than perfectly watchable. But the clues to why this film isn’t quite truthful lie in those long-ago performances of Jackson and Bogarde. Call it rattiness, call it waspishness, or pick another word not animal-related, but it came naturally to them in a way that it doesn’t to the genial patriarch of Downton Abbey and the lovably scatterbrained matriarch of The Durrells.
NOW, I yield to nobody in my admiration of Bonneville and Hawes, both so splendid so often, and by no means typecast by their most familiar roles. But for all the work that was done to give him an appropriately highdomed forehead, and her movie star looks notwithstanding, they are both a little wrong here.
Do any reading up on Tessa’s wretched childhood or Roald’s vicious anti-Semitism and it becomes clear that the casting, nearly as much as the script and direction, soft-soaps a story that should really feel like a hard, painful scrub.
■ ANOTHER actress used to playing the English rose plays another hard-boiled American in I Care A Lot, a black-as-pitch comedy-thriller that grips the attention from its opening frame and only briefly lets go.
Rosamund Pike is terrific as Marla Grayson, an impeccably groomed legal guardian for the elderly and infirm who, behind her veneer of professional compassion, is an irredeemable con artist, fleecing her wards of their life savings.
But when she and her co-conspirator and lover Fran (Eliza Gonzalez) target the well-to-do Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) for their scam, they cut themselves badly opening a can of worms, which yields Peter Dinklage as a Russian mafia boss.
It gets sillier and sillier, more and more improbable and loses its way ever so slightly in the third act. But on the whole it’s huge fun, and a triumph for its British writer-director J Blakeson.
■ To olivia is available from today on Sky Cinema; i Care a lot on amazon Prime video.