THE LAUREATE
Cert 15★★★
In cinemas now
How do you turn a dead writer’s life into exciting cinema? Since there’s nothing remotely cinematic about typing, it really helps if your scribbler had an exciting private life.
Thankfully, I, Claudius author Robert Graves did some very unusual things away from his writing desk.
This handsome, well-acted but largely forgettable period drama opens with a tantalising glimpse of a 1929 incident involving a ménage à trois and someone tumbling out of an upstairs window.
While we’re mulling that over, we see shots of the trenches and hear a sonorous voice reciting war poetry.
Graves (Tom Hughes) goes on to recall how he was wounded and left for dead in the Battle Of The Somme, a telegram sent to his grief-stricken parents.
It seems the window incident may have stemmed from a troubled mind. Graves, like many men of his generation and most male characters in 1920s-set dramas, suffered from PTSD.
The film jumps back to 1924 and the handsome house in rural Oxfordshire where Graves is living with his loving illustrator wife Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) and their young daughter.
Graves has published several volumes of poetry (conveniently stacked on a shelf above his head) but he’s blocked, broke and his mournful verses are out of step with the hedonistic Roaring Twenties.
Drastic measures are needed. The couple invite bohemian American writer Laura Riding (Dianna Agron) to live with them so she can look after the kid and help Robert to write a new book.
Laura definitely shakes things up.
Nancy describes their new living arrangement as “a modern relationship without any regards to the formal conventions of society”.
Put in less exalted terms, Laura starts sleeping with the pair of them. Unfortunately, she’s a bit mad and ruthlessly ambitious.
Writer and director William Nunez isn’t remotely interested in Laura’s writing but she keeps this zippy period soap opera ticking over.