See How They Run
Tom George (2022)
In an interview for Sight and Sound (October 2022), Tom George was asked (by Trevor Johnston) if it mattered that audiences hadn’t heard of the real-life individuals who rub shoulders with fictional creations in See How They Run. George, best known as the director of the hit BBC Three mockumentary sitcom This Country, thinks not – and expects that ‘the vast majority of viewers … won’t register at all’ the name Richard Attenborough, let alone his wife Sheila Sim or the film producer John Woolf. This antediluvian viewer’s in the minority. When I first heard mention of George’s film, with its early post-war, London West-End-theatre setting, I took it to be some kind of reworking of the venerable vicarage farce of the same name: Philip King’s See How They Run enjoyed an eighteen-month opening run at the Comedy Theatre in 1945-46 and has been revived plenty of times since then. In fact, the murine flavour of George’s title refers to another play, whose theatrical longevity is legendary. Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1952 (with a cast that included Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim), moved to St Martin’s Theatre in 1974 and, except for the inevitable year or so of Covid interruptus, has kept going ever since.
George’s See How They Run, with a screenplay by Mark Chappell, begins at a party to celebrate The Mousetrap’s hundredth performance, in early 1953. The film’s characters are introduced in voiceover by one of their number, Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), a seedy Hollywood director trying to persuade John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) to hire him to helm a movie version of The Mousetrap. At the party, Köpernick makes a drunken pass at Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda), which leads to fisticuffs with Dickie Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), but the American seems set to be our narrator until he’s murdered backstage by an unseen assailant. Enter Scotland Yard’s Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his eager, novice sidekick, Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), to investigate and get this ‘Agatha Christie-inflected period comedy whodunnit’ (S&S) properly underway. In reality, The Mousetrap hasn’t come close to the big screen, thanks to a contractual clause effective since 1952: when the play first opened, its author stipulated that it shouldn’t become a film until at least six months after the end of its original stage run. This is a good joke of commercial theatre history. It’s also a nice irony that See How They Run was shot in 2020-21, when the West End was dark.
Tom George’s high-powered ensemble – right enough for an Agatha Christie number, parody or otherwise – gives little cause for complaint, though Sam Rockwell, perhaps because he’s working so hard to keep up a clipped English accent (of sorts), is rather submerged in the character of world-weary Inspector Stoppard. I’d feared from the trailer that Saoirse Ronan would come across as too accomplished for her daft role but I needn’t have worried: she’s consistently, deftly funny. The selection of her punchlines featured in the trailer can’t convey the pleasure there turns out to be in watching Ronan build up to them. Tall, handsome Harris Dickinson is, in physical terms, almost comically miscast as Richard Attenborough but he’s likeable and his effortful vocal mimicry is oddly amusing. Although David Oyelowo’s camp, pretentious screenwriter Mervyn Norris-Cocker proves less tiresome than his first scene threatens, it’s still a relief when he becomes the film’s second corpse. On the other hand, it’s a shame that Adrien Brody’s Köpernick is so quickly the first. Sir Max Mallowan, Agatha Christie’s famous archaeologist husband, is played by Lucien Msamati. Whether or not this is intended as a send-up of colour-blind casting, Msamati plays wittily; so does Paul Chahidi, as the Mallowans’ hapless butler. Chahidi (as the vicar) was the best thing in This Country, one of whose stars, Charlie Cooper, appears in See How They Run in the key part of Dennis, a seemingly dim-witted theatre usher. The line-up also includes Ruth Wilson (as the show’s producer), Sian Clifford (Edana Romney, John Woolf’s actual wife) and Shirley Henderson (Agatha Christie). Tim Key is excellent in his brief appearance as Met Commissioner Harold Scott (another real person).
Despite the skilful ensemble acting, the film putters along and peters out. Tom George talks interestingly in S&S about his approach to directing comedy. He sees This Country and See How They Run, though apparently ‘chalk and cheese’, as ‘both character comedies’. For George, ‘whether it’s TV or film, it’s always about story, character and comedy with performance tying everything together’. He gives a thoughtful answer to Trevor Johnston’s question of whether he worried, with ‘meta layer, complex procedural plotting and a historical element too’, ‘it would all get too congested for the comedy to come alive’. See How They Run’s critical defect is, rather, that it never comes alive as a whodunit, even a tongue-in-cheek one. The plot thickens but not enough. There’s next to no momentum to proceedings, even in the climax, when the action moves to an isolated country house, the setting of The Mousetrap and countless other Agatha Christie pieces. (In this case, the country house is Christie’s home.) Whereas the cast seems to get what George is after, Daniel Pemberton, who wrote the film’s music, is clearly under the impression that he’s scoring a rollicking murder-mystery spoof. See How They Run wants to be cleverer than that. It’s really designed for cognoscenti for whom lines like ‘He’s a real hound, Inspector’ – addressed to a character called Stoppard – are all that’s needed. The verbal cleverness isn’t as annoying as it might have been. The whole film is mildly entertaining. But that’s a damning adverb.
15 September 2022