We finally caught up with SEE HOW THEY RUN, actually only a year or so after its release.
I was drawn to the movie for slightly unusual reasons, I suspect. Of course the idea of a period English cosy crime whodunnit set in a detailed reproduction of 1950s theatreland appealed to me, and the casting of Saoirse Ronan Sam Rockwell Adrien Brody Reece Shearsmith Shirley Henderson appealed.
But I was interested in the fact that one of the real-life characters who turns up in the movie is Edana Romney, writer-star of the Cocteauesque gothic thriller CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS. Including her seemed a clue to a weird and idiosyncratic sensibility.
This is the film’s one major disappointment — Romney appears for the very uneccentric reason that she was married to producer John Woolf (Shearsmith), so she plays the role of jealous wife, or rather Sian Clifford, who plays her, plays her playing it, and her accomplishments in the cinema are ignored.
Actually, this relates to another, more minor disappointment — how can you do a murder mystery with John Woolf in it and neglect the fact that his producing partner was his gay brother James? There could be a good plot twist in that.
The racially-blind casting which is now dominant in the UK occasionally sets up curious questions — Woolf is shown carrying on an affair with his P.A., played by Pippa Bennett-Warner, who is Black. There’s a blackmail attempt, but the racial angle plays no role, is never mentioned, as it surely would be in the early 1950s. Shoehorning diversity into heritage cinema is surely a good thing: pretending race isn’t a social factor, and that things weren’t worse in the past, is not unambiguously good. The solution? Be brilliant. And write more actual Black characters.
Otherwise this is good fun. Ronan and Rockwell make a great team and Mark Chappell’s plotting and dialogue are both clever enough to pull off the necessary laughs and surprises. It all needs to be, in some hard-to-define way, 10% better to fully achieve the KNIVES OUT cosy place pleasure it’s aiming for, but we found it very pleasurable.
Director Tom George has seen a lot of Wes Anderson, which makes for, as we know, a bold and graphically pleasing style. He throws in a bunch of splitscreen stuff which doesn’t much help and tends to kill a sense of period. Indeed, the one thing that might have helped him — he’s cast the thing brilliantly, down to the smallest butler — would be a greater awareness — or influence from, because he might have been aware — of 50s cinema. Merging the Anderson effects with a dash of Powell & Pressburger (THE RED SHOES for backstage drama), Wendy Toye (THREE CASES OF MURDER and THE STRANGER LEFT NO CARD for Peculiar Crimes), and any other pertinent films of the approximate period (GREEN FOR DANGER, AN INSPECTOR CALLS, SAPPHIRE?) would have given the film more of a unique personality — I know it’d have done it by imitation, but I don’t think one should imitate only the obvious contemporary things that everybody else is already imitating, and Wes Anderson is definitely that. Plus, he’s easy to do.
I was idly thinking the other day that GOSFORD PARK is, as far as I know, the only film in which Stephen Fry works. And he shouldn’t, since his character is several notches more comedic than anyone else’s. But through some weird alchemy it hangs together perfectly. Well, SEE HOW THEY RUN might best be described as a film where everybody is at the level of sitcom silliness that Fry achieved. And this works, of course, because it’s consistent, but it’s less memorable because of that. The only character who shifts the balance into drama, momentarily, is the killer, and I can’t give him away. He’s very good, I hope we hear more of him, and I felt his character deserved more sympathetic treatment, even if he is clearly a homicidal maniac. Nobody’s perfect.
Someone called Harris Dickinson plays Richard Attenborough (right), seemingly without any reference to the real Dickie, or else he’s very bad at impersonation. But he’s a very good comedian — everything he does is funny. Pearl Chanda plays his sensible wife, Sheila Sim. Our disappointment at Adrien Brody’s early exit was assuaged by frequent flashbacks, and he’s very fine as always. Paul Chahidi is very funny as a butler named Fellowes (a GOSFORD jab), and the poet-comedian Tim Key turns out to be a good actor too. David Oyelowo camps it up and Shirley Henderson continues to be British cinema’s secret weapon, secret for too long.
And yes, I consider it a Christmas movie as it is a cosy crime film, a period movie, British, and contains snow, both “real” and stage.
SEE HOW THEY RUN stars Jo March; Chuck Barris; Salvador Dali; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Papa Lazarou; Margaret Goff; J. Paul Getty III; Agent Salmakia; Shannon Dumania; Princess Olga; Sith Fleet Officer; Hammerhead Captain; General Charles Motomba; Side Kick Simon; and Moaning Myrtle.
shadowplay 