Dahl-ing, it’s a delight!
Dame Emma’s monstrous Miss Trunchbull steals the show in a musical Matilda’s creator would have adored
Matilda The Musical (PG, 117 mins)
Verdict: An exuberant joy ★★★★★ Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (12A, 139 mins)
Verdict: Calculated fun ★★★☆☆
JUST in case you’re already seeking respite from the ubiquitous World Cup coverage, let me start by apologising for a football analogy. When the streaming giant Netflix shelled out an eye-watering $500million for Roald Dahl’s back catalogue last year, plenty thought it had overpaid. But Matilda The Musical is like an expensive striker in fantastic form; suddenly, the investment looks like shrewd business.
This film is an exuberant joy from beginning to end, superbly written, acted and choreographed, and might even have delighted the notoriously dyspeptic Dahl himself.
It was adapted from the monumental West End and Broadway hit, but that isn’t always a recipe for success on screen. Moreover, director Matthew Warchus is the man who reworked Dahl’s novel for the stage in the first place, and the words, music and lyrics are by original writers Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin, so there might easily have been a constraining theatrical feel to the enterprise.
Instead, Warchus uses the camera to give the story, about a girl prodigy who uses telekinetic powers to outsmart an evil headmistress, a whole new energy. It works gloriously on screen.
Helpfully, all the children are splendid and little Alisha Weir, the Irish newcomer in the title role, is a real find. She is wonderful, and looks exactly right, too.
MATIlDAmustn’t be too winsome. For all her goodness, she has a proper devilish streak. Young Alisha captures that perfectly. Imagine being only 11 years old and not being remotely upstaged by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, both an absolute hoot as Matilda’s appalling parents, or even by the great dame herself, Emma Thompson.
With broken veins, discoloured teeth, a hairy chin, shelf-like bosom and enormous black bovver boots, Thompson plays the monstrous head, Agatha Trunchbull, as a kind of (vaguely) female Benito Mussolini, strutting around her empire striking fear into the hearts of everyone — except Matilda — who dares meet her dreadful glare.
It is a scene-stealing gift of a role (played in the 1996 nonmusical film version by Pam Ferris) and is rumoured to have been offered first to Ralph Fiennes. But Thompson, in turning into Miss Trunchbull, the English hammerthrowing champion of 1959, grabs the opportunity and hurls it out of the park.
The part of Miss Honey, the loving, sympathetic teacher who persuades Matilda’s awful parents to let her go to school, is in some ways a harder character to play convincingly, but lashana lynch does a lovely job.
It is tricky to pick a favourite song or favourite scene; they are all so witty, so pleasing on the ear and the eye, with occasional echoes of another wonderful film musical, Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968).
But if I had to choose, it would be Miss Trunchbull’s demonic spelling test, followed by her crypto-fascist anthem, The Smell Of Rebellion.
Three cheers to everyone involved, but perhaps above all to Roald Dahl, who in dreaming all this up, gave other amazingly creative people the chance to build on his mighty legacy.
■ THE amazingly creative mind in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, appears to belong to a tech billionaire called Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is seemingly on the verge of solving the planet’s energy crisis.
He is so preposterously rich that he has leased the Mona lisa to bail out the pandemic-stricken French government. But is he really the clever-clogs he purports to be? The task of finding out, and of solving the twisted whodunnit that develops once people start dropping dead, falls to the world’s greatest detective, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), whom we first met three years ago in Knives Out. In truth I preferred the first film; it had a playful charm, whereas this one seems a little calculated, with a plot, even with explanatory flashbacks, too wildly labyrinthine for its own good. Still, Craig is again terrific, still hamming the louisiana accent so that it sounds like a mint julep in vocal form. It comes as no great surprise this time to learn that Blanc is gay (watch out for the fleeting star cameo, revealing his boyfriend), with no romantic interest in his sidekick, Bron’s former business partner, played by Janelle Monae.
Otherwise, nothing is quite as it seems in Bron’s Greek island lair, which is crowned by an onion-shaped crystal palace. He designed it in homage to a bar where he met the friends who are now in his thrall, and his pocket.
They include fashionista Birdie (Kate Hudson), politician Claire (Kathryn Hahn), and social-media star Duke (Dave Bautista), and they have all been summoned to the island to play a fiendish murder mystery game conceived by Bron himself, with some help, he concedes, from the Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn.
The script is peppered with pop-cultural references like that, which makes it good fun, if at times leaving you with the unhelpful suspicion that writer-director Rian Johnson and his cast might be having 25 per cent more of a hoot than their audience.
■ Matilda is in cinemas from today. Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery is in cinemas until next Wednesday, then on Netflix from december 23.