Sulphur and White
Julian Jarrold (2020)
Julian Jarrold’s drama is named for butterflies of the Pieridae family, found in various tropical and subtropical regions that include South Africa. Seminal scenes of Sulphur and White take place there, during the apartheid era. The title also points to connotations of sulphur and white: based on the life of David Tait, this film is about the effects of the hellish on the innocent. Now in his late fifties, Tait has enjoyed a long and successful career in the financial world. He’s an ambassador and major fund-raiser for the NSPCC, having climbed Everest five times to raise money for charity. He’s also a childhood abuse survivor. Tait is an impressive individual, as evidenced in an interview with him and Jarrold on the HeyUGuys.com YouTube channel, but Sulphur and White is hamstrung by Jarrold’s direction and by Susanne Farrell’s screenplay. They combine to make a true story impossible to believe.
Kevin Maher in The Times gives the film a negative review but acknowledges the ‘daring conceit at the heart of this abuse drama … For nearly two hours it presents us with an obnoxious, arrogant, back-stabbing, philandering, near-psychopathic London City trader called David (Mark Stanley), then reveals, via flashbacks to his grim childhood in South Africa, that he was sexually abused’. This quite misrepresents the storyline, which very soon makes clear the nature of the protagonist’s boyhood ordeal. If Maher really did see Sulphur and White in the way he suggests, he must be in a tiny minority of viewers who don’t get that the ten-year-old David (Hugo Stone) grows into the thirtyish David that still experiences subliminal flashbacks to the trauma of his early years. It’s a serious structural weakness that, since we already know the root cause of David’s disagreeable behaviour, we spend nearly the whole two-hour film waiting for him to tell someone else about it.
That someone turns out to be his second wife, Vanessa (Emily Beecham). David meets her when both are City high-flyers in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Their relationship starts to go wrong when Vanessa is pregnant and collapses soon after the birth of their son Seth. There’s next to nothing in the film about David’s first marriage except a little scene of his leaving the home he shared with his wife and their two children. When, at work, David first propositions Vanessa, she turns him down with ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ but there’s no suggestion that, as she and David grow closer, she ever asks about his other family. She does, at an early stage of their relationship, ask about David’s parents. He explains that he and they have grown apart, that his mother now lives abroad, that he doesn’t see his father. The first of these things is a large understatement, the second a lie, the third true. David’s mother Joanne (Anna Friel) is still living in the suburban London house that becomes the Taits’ home after their return from South Africa. Although the narrative doesn’t make this quite clear, it seems that Joanne and her husband Donald (Dougray Scott) are still together.
Whenever Julian Jarrold and Susanne Farrell are faced with a tricky or complicating issue in the story, they have a simple strategy: just ignore it. Once David and Vanessa have decided to marry, he arranges for them to meet his father – lunch in a posh restaurant. It’s unclear whether David plans this as a rapprochement or as an inevitable fiasco. Either way, you could cut the atmosphere between the two men with a knife but Vanessa is oblivious. She makes charming small talk; she looks forward to seeing Donald again at the wedding. There’s no sign of him there but nothing is said about that either. Settling into their new home, paid for by David’s latest, spectacular bonus, the newlyweds are visited by his vile boss Jeff (Alistair Petrie), who asks if Vanessa’s pregnant yet. When David replies, ‘That’s not really on the agenda’, Vanessa looks angry. In the next scene, she’s having an ultrasound, with David looking on. He’s thoroughly disengaged throughout the pregnancy. When Seth is born, David finds the baby’s crying so intolerable that he puts on headphones to block out the noise. Vanessa is exasperated, distressed and alarmed by her husband’s lack of interest in fatherhood but she never tries to find out what’s causing it.
Even if this reflects essentially what happened in the early days of the marriage of the real David and Vanessa Tait (their marriage has lasted and they have two sons, Seth and Ethan), it’s implausible that it happened in the way Sulphur and White suggests – and it’s simply not good enough in a dramatisation of David’s story. Whether or not a script derives from real-life events, it needs to make sense as a piece of drama. It’s incredible David doesn’t argue the toss when Vanessa makes clear she wants a child, except that you realise by this stage that writing such a dialogue between them comes into the category of a problem best avoided. I assume his first failed marriage is drawn from the real David’s life story if only because, as an invention, it would be entirely inconvenient to the film-makers. It’s still, in any event, bizarre. David has been through fatherhood twice before, with a son and a daughter from his first marriage. The film’s hysterical presentation of his reaction to is third child makes you wonder how David took as long as he did to abandon his previous household.
Julian Jarrold seems dead set against anything that might detract from the impact of David’s eventual opening up to Vanessa. Yet, when the big moment eventually arrives, the director flunks even this. The beleaguered David calls round to see his estranged wife and she prepares him some food. She carries on doing so for an oddly long time after he’s embarked on his revelations. He’s well into his dreadful story before she stops chopping mushrooms and turns to look at him. Once he’s admitted his dark secret, though, the effect is as simplistically cathartic as it used to be in Hollywood melodramas where a psychiatrist found the key to a patient’s lifelong problems and hey presto. As David prepares to leave the house next morning, Vanessa takes his hand to stop his doing so. A few seconds later, she’s watching him happily cradling Seth in his arms. According to the statistics shown on screen at the end of the film, one in every twenty British children suffers sexual abuse; of these, one in every three tells no one. It’s unarguable that, if it increases the latter figure Sulphur and White will have done a good thing. Even so, its conclusion seems a travesty of the psychological and emotional complexity of coming to terms with experiences like David Tait’s.
A 2015 interview with Tait in the Financial Times[1] describes how, in 1993, he ‘found himself choosing between whether to turn right to go to work, or left to Beachy Head, the chalky clifftops in East Sussex. He drove left and walked along the headland. “To this day, I don’t know what I was going to do,” he recalls.’ The film begins with this incident. David clambers up Beachy Head, stands on the cliff edge and looks down. Most of what follows – the South African childhood, money market sequences, episodes featuring the fifteen-year-old David (Anson Boon), the relationship with Vanessa – comprises a series of nested flashbacks from this prologue. Julian Jarrold then returns to it: still on the clifftop, David is tackled from behind by a police officer and dragged to safety. The last part of the narrative moves forward in time from this point, climaxing in David’s confession to Vanessa.
Along with Beachy Head, the African veldt and blue skies (and butterflies) provide the most striking images in Sulphur and White but the setting also eliminates any element of surprise the story might have had in the short time before the sexual abuse occurs. Plenty of viewers (this one included) are predisposed to expect the worst of Afrikaners during the apartheid regime – a prejudice that the actors playing them here do nothing to dilute. A shopkeeper (Grant Swanby) is the first of the locals to rape David; two other members of the same paedophile ring later join in. All three of them telegraph evil from the moment they appear on screen. So does Dougray Scott, as David’s father and most persistent abuser, and Scott doesn’t even have the excuse, which the others do, of wanting to make the most of a short-lived role. Donald Tait, who’s also a wife-beater, has recently taken up a posting at a Johannesburg bank. He’s British (I think: Scott’s accent is sui generis) but his malignant stare makes him an honorary South African. Donald soon loses his job, which makes him all the more choleric. There’s no evidence that he gets another job once the Taits return to England: I wasn’t sure if Donald was actually unemployed or whether Jarrold needed him always to be at home in order to continue to assault his teenage son – until, that is, the moment that David fights back.
This happens after the most extended episode involving the fifteen-year-old David – an episode typical of the film. Joanne, concerned about her son’s mental health, takes him to a healing church. They drive there with a neighbour, her teenage daughter and two other girls. It’s a tight squeeze for the four kids in the back of the car and the neighbour’s daughter makes the most of this to try and sexually excite David. She succeeds and he ejaculates, desperately trying to conceal the evidence as he gets out of the car before hurrying into the church toilets. He’s barely joined his mother in a pew before the charismatic pastor (Trevor a Toussaint) calls him out from the congregation and starts the laying on of hands but it’s not too soon for David or Jarrold to have forgotten he needs to keep his trousers front concealed. The scene would so much more powerful and affecting if David were still preoccupied with this while a miracle is supposed to be taking place. Something similar happens when, after Beachy Head, the adult David is interviewed by a doctor (Lorna Brown) who has to decide whether or not he should be sectioned. ‘I need to be sure,’ she says, ‘you’re not going to be splattered over an area of outstanding natural beauty any time soon’. It’s a grimly amusing line, well delivered, but its implications are instantly forgotten. David’s reply is, ‘I can see that would be inconvenient’. After a couple more ambiguous answers, he’s free to go.
Sulphur and White opened in the UK a week before cinemas closed. I didn’t notice it at the time and, in the pre-Covid-19 world, might well have continued to ignore it. Perhaps the film would have been streamed by Curzon in any event but the cessation of new theatrical releases must have reduced the queue for Curzon Home Cinema slots and Sulphur and White is already available there. I obviously don’t think it’s much of a film but I’m glad it was made – because David Tait’s story is worth telling and because it gives a starring role to Mark Stanley, fast becoming one of my favourite British actors. (He’s brilliant in Criminal: UK, available on Netflix.) Hugo Stone, making his screen debut, is very good as the ten-year-old David; the vulnerability sometimes visible in Stanley’s eyes gives the man David a strong kinship with the boy in South Africa. (Anson Boon is compelling but his conspicuous oddness doesn’t quite fit with either the younger or the older David.) My recent note on Misbehaviour described Alexa Davies as ‘one of the few assets’ of ITV’s White House Farm earlier this year. Stanley was another, as Colin Caffell, the ex-husband of Jeremy Bamber’s sister: the trouble was, the emotional warmth and intelligence he gave Colin underlined the weakness of Freddie Fox’s one-note reptilian playing of Jeremy Bamber. It was unbelievable that Colin could have been close to, or taken in by, this version of Bamber. It’s great that Sulphur and White showcases Stanley’s talents but something similar happens here. The actor’s innate truthfulness throws into relief the defects of the screenplay and direction.
Mark Stanley isn’t the only cast member to do this. Emily Beecham is impressive too, especially in the early scenes between them. At the gruesome Alice in Wonderland garden party hosted by their boss Jeff and his similarly licentious wife Amber (Rosalie Craig), Beecham is a perfect blend of glamorous and socially uneasy. It’s not her fault the character she’s playing is so weakly written. Anna Friel’s role is even worse. She was tenaciously good as the mother of another troubled child in an increasingly implausible TV mini-series of 2018 called, coincidentally enough, Butterfly. In the South African scenes in Sulphur and White, Friel dramatises Joanne Tait’s predicament poignantly but her scenes in England get more and more ridiculous – and melodramatic in a sub-Dickensian way. First, she tracks the estranged David down to his place of work, where he quickly sends her packing. Joanne then appears on the other side of the glass doors of the Park Lane venue for David and Vanessa’s wedding reception – just enough for her son to glimpse her, then look away. Finally, the mother is on her deathbed, now with a contrite David at her side.
The implication seems to be that David cuts himself off from Joanne because she’s inextricably connected to the past he wants to suppress, rather than because he blames her for being complicit in his father’s abuse. But this too is unclear. David finally tells Vanessa he thinks his mother realised what was going on at some point after the family’s return to England because ‘it suddenly stopped’. Unless he’s deliberately lying (which seems unlikely), this doesn’t make sense. There’s a sequence in South Africa that suggests that Joanne witnesses what Donald is up to in David’s bedroom (needless to say, this isn’t followed up). Douglas tyrannises his wife as well as his son – it’s hard to see how she could prevail on him to change his ways without herself being violently abused. In any case, we’ve seen that Donald’s abuse of David stopped once the latter was physically strong enough to prevent it.
In the HeyUGuys interview, David Tait describes a main legacy of the abuse he suffered: an abiding ability – or compulsion – to focus on a single thing, excluding all other thoughts from his mind. He says it’s what made him such a successful City trader and has helped him in mountaineering. The other side of the coin is what he calls the ‘collateral damage’ that his insistent tunnel vision caused in his personal life. For Kevin Maher, this makes for a problematic protagonist. Comparing Sulphur and White with Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides (1991), Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting (1997) and last year’s abuse-survival drama, François Ozon’s By the Grace of God, Maher notes that ‘none of these was hobbled by a central character who was, essentially, an unsympathetic arsehole’.
As already indicated, I don’t see how it’s possible to view David in this way once it’s clear, as it soon is, what’s driving his behaviour. Nevertheless, Maher’s criticism does hint at an audience’s understandable preference, in watching a film with this kind of subject, to see a figure like David purely as a victim. His unkindness to his wives, children and mother certainly impedes that perspective – as does Julian Jarrold’s lack of subtlety. In the climactic scene with Vanessa, David says he’s ‘smooth on the outside’ but he has never been that. The real Tait has described the high-pressure competition within financial services in the last years of the 1980s economic boom as ‘accelerated Darwinism’; the film’s David stands out even in this environment as pathologically driven. In an early scene in the Goldman Sachs offices (I assume: this, at any rate, is where Tait cut his shark’s teeth as a trader), David’s fierce, adversarial concentration on the dazzling screens of numbers is scary. A colleague, watching in astonishment, calls him a ‘weirdo’. In response, David looks daggers at her and Jarrold keeps the camera on Mark Stanley’s face for much too long.
I’ve often admired Jarrold’s work on television[2] but Sulphur and White isn’t his finest hour. In South Africa, the Taits host a barbecue. Joanne and David bring drinks out to Donald and his paedophile guests. A glass is dropped and smashes. The men do nothing: it’s the wife’s job to clear up the broken glass. David is eager to help and cuts his finger badly. Late on, in a scene between Vanessa and David in the flat he rents after their separation, another glass bites the dust. David tells Vanessa to leave it but she insists on finding a dustpan and brush. The moment naturally evokes the earlier incident; the viewer can compare and contrast them. But it’s soon another instance of sloppy direction (Jarrold shows a butterfly mind here in more ways than one). Having swept up the glass, Vanessa doesn’t dispose of it. As if bored with the dustpan and its contents, she puts them on the table beside her and resumes arguing with David. Julian Jarrold is sometimes embarrassingly unimaginative too. In the very last scene, David takes the stage at what one assumes is the start of his career as a public speaker for NSPCC. This could have been an opportunity to show in a positive light his propensity to shut out everything around him. Instead, he appears conventionally nervous. I hoped he wouldn’t look out into the audience and find Vanessa’s lovely face smiling back supportively at him but I’m afraid that’s just what he does.
3 April 2020
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/86da606a-03b7-11e5-8585-00144feabdc0
[2] See note on The Girl for some examples of his work. More recently, Jarrold has directed, inter alia, episodes of The Crown and The Witness for the Prosecution, one of Sarah Phelps’s better attempts to modernise and darken Agatha Christie.