Old Yorker

  • The Ploughman’s Lunch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Eyre (1983)

    Richard Eyre, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Pryce were still young men when they collaborated on this film.  All three have enjoyed careers of high distinction since – they’re now Sir Richard, Sir Jonathan and Mr McEwan, CH – but I found The Ploughman’s Lunch a hateful film in 1983 and I still do.  That is, most of the characters in it are hateful; the sense of superiority of the people who made it is even more so.

    Like his creators, the film’s protagonist is a young man going places.  James Penfield (Pryce), from a working-class background but with an Oxford degree, works in the BBC Radio 4 newsroom and has writing ambitions.  He authored a well-received chapter on the Berlin Airlift for a recent Cold War anthology; he’s now planning a book on the Suez Crisis.  Tom Gold (David de Keyser), the prospective publisher, takes him for lunch.  As James outlines the take on Suez that he has in mind, Gold interrupts, ‘You’re not a socialist then?’  James confirms he’s not, assuming that’s what Gold wants to hear.  When James has another lunch, with eminent left-wing historian and Suez expert Ann Barrington (Rosemary Harris), she phrases that question differently and James affirms his socialism.  It’s not only his two-facedness you notice from these exchanges.  Gold seems less interested in James’s politics than in the dessert trolley.  When James visits Ann, we already know that he wants to sleep with her daughter, Susan (Charlie Dore); the glint in Ann’s eye, as soon as she meets James, suggests it’s not only his leftist credentials that appeal to her.

    James’s pal from Oxford, the more posh Jeremy Hancock (Tim Curry), is also a journalist.  He humorously claims he gave James the material for his contribution to the Cold War book.  He advises James that ‘Your way into the daughter’s pants is through the mother, up the Suez Canal’.  He eventually betrays his friend by succeeding with Susan, who’s also posh, where James failed.  Ann Barrington may be a card-carrying socialist but she’s now married to Matthew Fox (Frank Finlay), Susan’s rolling-in-it stepfather, who makes television commercials; their home is a pile in the Norfolk countryside.  James pays next to no attention to his own humble father (Nat Jackley) and dying mother (Pearl Hackney), though he’s the apple of her eye.  It’s an embarrassing moment when he’s called to the phone in Norfolk and it’s his father on the line.  James’s first question is, ‘How did you get this number?’ (it’s a good question), and his second, ‘Well, don’t they have painkillers for that?’, before he ends the conversation as quickly as possible.  Ian McEwan’s original screenplay takes the view that, if you can’t be trusted in one aspect of your life you can’t be trusted in any.

    The narrative’s third lunch gives the film its title.  At one point in his Norfolk weekend, which sees James sharing a bed with Ann rather than Susan, Matthew asserts that Britain is now, if nothing else, the undisputed world leader in the art of TV adverts.  He works in London during the week and invites James to observe the making of a commercial.  During a break in filming, they go to a pub, where Matthew informs James that the food they’re eating illustrates the power of advertising:  ‘Ploughman’s lunch – traditional English fare … in fact it’s the invention of an advertising campaign they ran in the early sixties to encourage people to eat in pubs.  A completely successful fabrication of the past …’  Matthew then says he knows what’s going on between James and his wife, and that James has his permission to carry on carrying on (not that James does).  There’s no doubt this is a key episode in The Ploughman’s Lunch – not least because it epitomises the film’s own fraudulence and flimsiness.

    There’s no good reason for Matthew to invite James to watch the commercial being made or for James to accept the invitation.  If Matthew – a notorious philanderer, as his wife knows and as he freely admits – wanted to give his blessing to Ann enjoying a bit of adultery, why not tip James the wink in Norfolk?  The reason for the sequence is, of course, the ploughman’s lunch.  In an interview with Sight and Sound (Autumn 1983), McEwan explained that he told Richard Eyre about the meal’s commercial derivation and they agreed it would be ‘a good starting point’ for the film, which is centrally concerned with the ‘fake past’ and ‘contemporary “reality” as something that people make up’ (McEwan again) – in myths around the British Empire and Suez, in news coverage, and so on.  But disparaging the ploughman’s lunch as a ‘fabrication’, swallowed by the public in more ways than one, seems phoney in itself.  Didn’t ploughmen sometimes eat bread and cheese during the working day?  Was the man-in-the-street conned into thinking the man-in-the-field traditionally accompanied his lunch with a peel-off mini-pack of Branston pickle?

    So much of McEwan’s writing, even at this early stage of his career, is about showing off how much he knows.  Ann Barrington, when she isn’t eyeing James up, is regaling him with Suez lore and she’s not the only Suez expert in the film; James also goes to hear a lecture on the subject and records an interview with the lecturer (Bill Paterson).  So we’re left in no doubt that McEwan is well informed, too.  Even so, The Ploughman’s Lunch attracted attention on its original release because it was politically up-to-the-minute.  The first draft screenplay was written before the Falklands War, the script then rewritten to provide a running commentary on the Falklands campaign – on TV sets in the background to scenes, as well as in the BBC radio newsroom.  The film was released in Britain in May 1983, just a few weeks before Margaret Thatcher’s landslide win in the post-Falklands General Election.  But the real coup is that the story’s climax takes place at the 1982 Tory conference in Brighton.  This means not only that James, Jeremy and Susan (who works at LWT) are in the conference hall where actual delegates applaud speeches but also that there are walk-on appearances, on the margins of the conference, from the likes of Kenneth Baker and Paul Johnson (the ex-New Statesman editor and right-wing convert, not the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in his teenage years).

    Richard Eyre had official permission to film the conference.  McEwan told Sight and Sound that ‘We went in as ourselves, shooting a feature film, a romantic comedy!  They had seen the script and they had no objection’.  These words also have a weren’t-we-clever ring to them – as if McEwan and Eyre had pulled the wool over the eyes of Conservative Central Office.  But why would they have objected?  On paper, The Ploughman’s Lunch looks to be censuring left-wing hypocrisy, snobbery and unscrupulous careerism but not Conservatism as such.  Just about the only expression of James’s political agenda as a writer that comes across as plausible is when he tells the publisher Gold (ellipses indicate the latter’s continuing gateau preoccupation):

    ‘I’d like to break away … break away completely from … from all the moralising and talk of national humiliation that is now the standard line on Suez … I’d want to set out events as they happened.  The way I see it is this: the British Empire was an ideal.  It may have become totally obsolete by the middle of this century, but it wasn’t totally dishonourable to try and defend its remains and try and salvage some self-respect, which is what I think the Conservatives were trying to do.’

    Rather than disparaging Tory values in the script, the film relies on the likes of Francis Pym, Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher to condemn themselves out of their own mouths in their speeches from the Brighton platform – which they do in no uncertain terms.  But Eyre’s camera in the conference hall is recording, principally, the last act of a romantic comedy.  A peculiarly sour romantic comedy, that is, as James witnesses clear evidence of Jeremy and Susan’s being an item.

    James and Jeremy’s poet friend Edward (Simon Stokes) seems decent but is innocuous, like James’s father.  Since anybody who’s somebody in The Ploughman’s Lunch is presented as reprehensible, you’re bound to wonder what Eyre and McEwan think might amount to nobler priorities or behaviour.  They’re not morally obliged, of course, to show their political hand but if they’re not going to, they might at least show a bit of sympathy towards their characters.  When Susan, after telling James about her family, then asks about his, he says both his parents are dead.  This breathtaking callousness may be meant to signal James’s shame about his humble origins but it’s anyone’s guess:  we get no idea of what makes him tick.  His careerism gets to seem pretty half-hearted, too.  He dashes into the LWT building to meet Susan, who’s got hold of Suez newsreel archive to show him; once she puts it on, he soon loses interest in the screen in order to gaze at her.

    For what it is, the film is well acted but the characters are so circumscribed and dismissively written that it’s hard to enjoy any of the performers, though Tim Curry and Frank Finlay are the most naturally entertaining.  Jonathan Pryce, for all his strong presence, is opaque.  As Susan’s young stepbrother, Orlando Wells is as annoying as everyone else but just what the film-makers must have wanted, rattling off the kings and queens of England or telling his big sister what she’s doing wrong as they play chess.  Christopher Fulford is, as usual, good, in the small role of an overeager junior journalist in the newsroom.

    Eyre and McEwan’s appetite for disparaging James is insatiable.  His newsreader colleague (David Lyon), whose marriage has collapsed, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  When he says his wife has left him, James asks what happened.  The newsreader doesn’t want to talk about it yet the ending of the conversation seems to be James’s fault because his concern is insincere.  Driving back from his first visit to Norfolk, he has a flat tyre – just outside a Greenham Common-type peace camp, where he borrows a jack.  When she finds out that he works for BBC, one of the women, Carmen (Sandra Voe), tells James how badly their campaign needs national media coverage and asks him to help.  He tells her he’s ‘news, not features – it might help if you could get yourselves attacked by the police’.  In other words, he shows his cynical true colours; the faces of Carmen and her colleague Betty (Libba Davies) show their realisation of what he’s like.  By the time they turn up again in a demo at the Tory conference, they’ve forgotten:  they smile at James who, to their astonishment, cuts them dead.

    The film is barely more interested in James’s mother than he is:  after that inconvenient phone call, there’s no further mention of her or his father (though enough time has passed for James to complete his Suez book and for Tom Gold to approve it).  Until the final scene, that is.  Cheap shots at the anti-hero continue right through to the closing shot.  He and his father stand at his mother’s graveside.  As a priest reads from the Book of Common Prayer, James glances, not very surreptitiously, at his watch.  Until they fall out over Susan, James and Jeremy spend a fair amount of extracurricular time together – attending a public poetry reading by Edward, playing squash.  At the reading, they’re convulsed with laughter when Edward takes questions from the audience and an elderly woman (Anna Wing) uncertainly asks how he gets his ideas.  They play squash for ten minutes before stopping for a cigarette break – they think it’s a scream when a coach (Ken Shorter) tells them they can’t smoke on the court.  We’re meant to find their conduct outrageous but James and Jeremy in these two sniggering scenes just made me think of Richard Eyre and Ian McEwan.

    6 December 2024

  • Starve Acre

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Kokotajlo (2023)

    Judging chiefly from the tank tops in evidence, the time is the 1970s.  The place is somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales.  Richard Willoughby (Matt Smith), his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark) and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) have moved there from Leeds; in Richard’s case, moved back there – he grew up in this rural area, where his father bought land.  A university teacher and researcher, Richard now lives in the farmhouse where he grew up.  Juliette keeps chickens and wants to branch out into sheep or goats.  Owen, however, is an increasing worry to his parents.  He’s asthmatic.  When he goes to bed at night, he hears someone whistling.  At a village fair, other children are terrified as a white pony lies groaning in pain after being blinded in one eye; Richard and Juliette find their son sitting alone nearby, holding a piece of sharp, bloodstained wood.  They take him to a psychiatrist (Roger Barclay), who does a brain scan on the child.  Not long after this, Owen suffers a fatal asthma attack.

    This is how Daniel Kokotajlo’s second feature film begins.  His first, Apostasy (2017), was a fine piece of work and Starve Acre has a fine, evocative title (it refers both to the Willoughbys’ house and to the land in which it stands).  The writer-director’s screenplay is based on Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel of the same name, published in 2019.  By then, Apostasy had made its mark; assuming he already had some other possibilities in mind, Kokotajlo must have been very impressed by Hurley’s novel to choose it as his next film project.  For a while, Starve Acre raises hopes that he’ll be able to blend an upsetting human story with the material’s folk-horror aspect – dramatising the madness of grief experienced by parents who have lost a child.  But the old-weird-England paraphernalia gradually gains the upper hand and overwhelms the film.

    It’s significant that Richard Willoughby’s academic field is archaeology – even the word ‘field’ is significant.  Richard thinks Gordon (Sean Gilder), a friend of his late father who still lives locally, is an undesirable influence on Owen.  While they’re on a walk together, Richard tells his son that the roots of an old oak tree lie beneath the field they’re crossing.  Owen says he already knows this from Gordon and that ‘the oak tree’s spirit was like a doorway into worlds’.  Richard pooh-poohs this – ‘superstitions are silly ideas people made up before we understood how things really worked’ – but readily agrees when Owen suggests they find out where the tree’s roots are.  Despite unhappy memories of his own father and his professed rationalism, Richard is fascinated by a book that his father put together – jottings, drawings and poems about ancient local customs and folklore.  In the aftermath to Owen’s death he delivers on his promise to his son to start digging in the field.  He excavates animal bones and pieces them together, like a macabre jigsaw, to construct a complete hare skeleton.  He warms this by the fire and the creature returns to life, fur and all.  Richard eventually digs deep enough to uncover the roots of the tree that, according to his father’s writings, villagers cut down as a means of ‘sealing short access to the womb of nature … the pagan’s entrance to the spirit world’.  What’s left of the tree trunk is astonishingly well preserved.  ‘The faculty should be funding this,’ says Steven (Robert Emms), Richard’s colleague who comes to Starve Acre to inspect and help with the dig.

    In other words, the pagan roots underlying the surface of the modern world are buried but far from dead.  Owen calls his bedtime whistler Jack Grey, a name already known to Richard from his father’s book.  Also known as Dandelion Jack, he’s the spirit of some kind of ancient evil embedded in the landscape.  It emerges that Richard’s father tried to sacrifice his son in order to propitiate Jack.  The attempt failed, according to Gordon, because Richard’s father didn’t love his son – only a much-loved son will satisfy Jack so Owen fits the bill.  Not that Richard tried to sacrifice him; he was out at work at the time of the fatal asthma attack.  Juliette was at home, though, standing in the farmhouse doorway, her gaze fixed on the landscape beyond, her mind’s eye seeing blood-red images that, while hard to make out, look to prefigure the glowing fragments of the hare that Richard will resurrect.  Juliette later admits to Richard that, when she found Owen unconscious, she ‘had a moment of clarity that we’d be better off without him’ – but, then, bereavement has driven her crazy by this point.  Unlike Richard, she isn’t averse to Gordon.  It’s he who introduces Juliette to Mrs Forde (Melanie Kilburn), a local woman who comes to the farmhouse to conduct a meditation-cum-exorcism, chanting the mantra ‘Om Vajrapani Hum‘.  Mrs Forde then assures Juliette that ‘the dandelion has bud’ and that Owen ‘has moved on now’.

    This synopsis isn’t meant to be sarcastic.  It’s meant to give a sense of the impossibly heavy eerie-folkloric load that Daniel Kokotajlo is trying to grapple with – against which the human relationships in the story don’t stand a chance.  Juliette’s elder sister, Harrie (Erin Richards), comes to stay at Starve Acre, supposedly to help Juliette get over the tragedy of Owen’s death.  Harrie is forthright and self-assured and brings with her a Pekinese:  you can see why she might be an irritating house guest.  But this isn’t nearly enough to explain her brother-in-law’s strong antipathy to Harrie evident from the moment she arrives.  Richard’s boyhood baggage also gets in Kokotajlo’s way.  He has so much traumatic backstory – Juliette has no backstory – that it’s virtually in competition with his life being turned upside down by his son’s death.

    Even so, Starve Acre might have worked better with a stronger actor than Matt Smith in the main role.  Although his regional accent is fully absorbed, Smith is no more than vocally expressive:  his Richard is so closed off from the start that it’s hard to imagine what normal life, at home or at work, might once have been for him.  Morfydd Clark hints at this more successfully albeit in Juliette’s occasional light-hearted interactions with Harrie rather than in scenes with Richard.  Clark’s previous cinema role was also in a horror story, Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019); as in that film, she’s emotionally supple and credible despite the plot extremities.  Erin Richards’ Harrie, during the early part of her stay, evokes a world beyond Starve Acre, as she chatters about the boyfriend who’s cleaned her out of Pomerol or the film actors she fancies (Gene Hackman, surprisingly enough) or doesn’t fancy (Michael Caine).  Kokotajlo doesn’t supply a good reason, though, for this bossy, candid woman to stick around as things get weirder – it’s not even suggested that Harrie, against her better judgment, gets sucked into what’s turning into a madhouse.  Robert Emms, brilliant in Apostasy, hasn’t much to do but looks and sounds very right in the university common room.  Some actors in period clothes and accoutrements can’t disguise the fact that they’re in costume:  Emms completely inhabits his sports jacket and sideburns – he’s thoroughly 1970s (except when Steven says anachronistically, ‘No worries’).

    The main problem in Starve Acre’s cast is the hare redevivus, which is decidedly animatronic.  That said, Corey the Pekinese, a real dog (called Derek), looks electromechanical, too.  Corey is the film’s surprise survivor, given that it’s such common screen practice to kill off pet animals.  The humans here don’t fare so well.  Steven is stabbed to death by Juliette.  Harrie is killed with a hammer blow to the head from Richard, when Juliette gives him the nod.  They end up adopting the hare as their new baby:  Juliette puts it in a bath then breast-feeds it.  Daniel Kokotajlo is a talented film-maker and I still want to see what he does next.  I really hope, though, that he moves well away from the Starve Acre neighbourhood.

    2 December 2024

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