Dinklage saves this sketchy biopic of a tortured star
Afew years ago the BBC went through a phase of dramatising the lives of the stars. With Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd, Shirley Bassey and sundry more, the theme was always the price paid for being funny or fabulous. My Dinner with Hervé (Sky Atlantic), though more expensively assembled, sticks to the formula as it picks over the rackety career of Hervé Villechaize, the French dwarf who starred as Bond villain Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun and as Tattoo, the lovable sidekick in Fantasy Island.
The feature-length drama is half-based on an interview Villechaize gave shortly before taking his own life. Hervé is a wild Rabelaisian role for Peter Dinklage, whose clout as a star of Game of Thrones eventually greenlit the film. He swims in female flesh, sloshes down wine, goes on joyrides, brandishes knives; he cackles and howls and even gets to recite some Hamlet. What he can’t quite do is point a light into Hervé’s tortured soul.
An early vignette set in France sketches in his mother’s rejection. But once he gets to America, the story mutates into a familiar tale of corrosive celebrity. Hervé’s short stature doesn’t seem to figure as a root cause of his boiling rage. Whisper it softly, he just comes across as a bit of a self-pitying prat.
Even his rabid womanising isn’t explored as a pathology. The script shoves Hervé’s women aside – his first marriage isn’t even mentioned, nor his compulsive prostitute habit during the Bond shoot.
The interviewer (played by Jamie Dornan) is called Danny Tate. A beefed-up version of writer-director Sacha Gervasi, he has been given his own issues to play with – alcoholism, a broken marriage and job uncertainty – which are granted a status equal to the grander disaster that is Hervé’s rise and fall. But however much Dornan throws himself into it, who in the end cares about a fictionalised journalist’s petty problems?
Gervasi’s co-writer is Sean Macauley, who scripted the ski-jumping odyssey Eddie the Eagle. That story, which also had a tortuous gestation, was hugely moving as well as funny. Though greatly animated by Dinklage, My Dinner with Hervé doesn’t quite answer any of its own questions. Jasper Rees
Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel) unlocks her front door to find her flat ransacked, yet nothing missing – or so it appears. For a series heavy on metaphors, this penultimate episode of Black Earth Rising
(BBC Two), dealing with the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the opened with a big one.
The burglars were in search of the series’ Mcguffin: a recording made by former soldier Alice Munezero (Noma Dumezweni) in 1997. The conversation between Tutsi general Simon Nyamoya and an unnamed Congolese officer pertained to a hushed-up massacre in Zaire, where 50,000 Tutsi refugees died. Kate had survived, only now to learn that she was Hutu rather than Tutsi: oppressor rather than oppressed, as many would assume.
It boiled down to moral equivalence: how the death of around 50,000 Hutus was deemed insignificant in comparison to that of 800,000 Tutsis; any attempt to pursue prosecution for the former would have been doomed to fail, with the new, western-backed Tutsi government attempting to heal a ravaged nation.
“If we do not publicly recognise each and every fragment of our past, our story will never be complete,” reckoned Alice. “They don’t want to look back at any of it,” argued David Runihura (Lucian Msamati), into whose hands the recording had fallen. Neither could be said to be wrong. Alice’s motives and end goal – a loosening of new free-speech restrictions – were honourable, but the consequences could only be divisive, especially with Runihura the kingmaker behind a government whose proclamations of unity were already curdling into something more troubling.
The drama of this fine series has sometimes struggled to wriggle out from under its ambition – this episode featured a substantial information dump – and not every idea has come off, with the long-promised emotional pay-off of Kate’s true identity getting slightly lost in the shuffle.
But at least someone out there is tackling these big issues with an open mind and a determination to rebuff long-established narratives: black characters – and predominantly African ones – are now driving this story. It’s a deeply humane and thoughtful affair, as complex and unresolved as the subject demands; not easy viewing in any sense, but rewarding and profound. Gabriel Tate
My Dinner with Hervé Black Earth Rising