Old Yorker

Richard Curtis (2009)

The best thing about Richard Curtis’s latest – about the life, death and legacy of pirate radio in the 1960s – is that we saw it at the Lothian Road Odeon in Edinburgh.  It’s a really luxurious outfit compared with the Richmond Odeon.  The film was preceded by relatively very few adverts.  The cinema staff were amazingly helpful and charming in a way that puts the BFI to shame.   (I felt guilty when one of them asked us on our way out if we’d enjoyed the film – I muttered something inaudible.)  The second best thing was that we were literally the only people in a theatre which must seat several hundred.  It was good to have no enthusiastic audience reaction to contend with, although I doubt the empty house means that The Boat That Rocked is going to flop at the box office.  (This was a Thursday matinee the week after the Easter school holidays had ended.)  In the foyer they were selling a CD of sixties hits featured in the film and Sally bought one, even though I complained that buying two seats was more than enough financial support for this picture.   As a piece of filmmaking, The Boat is swill – another of Curtis’s feel-not-just-good-but-good-about-yourself atrocities – but its soundtrack is genuinely and unassailably feelgood.  If it’s frustrating that so few of the many songs are played all the way through in the movie, at least the end of one track means you’re always looking forward to the next one.

The legends on the screen both at the start and the end of the film suggest an historical perspective.  The introduction includes statistics about the paltry amount of time dedicated to the playing of recorded pop music by BBC radio at the time.   When the story gets underway, the government legislation enacted to outlaw pirate radio stations is referred to by its actual name – the Marine Offences Act.  The epilogue tells us that the number of round-the-clock rock/pop music stations worldwide is now more than two thousand – although it surprisingly omits the fact that the BBC launched Radio One only months after the pirate stations were forced to stop broadcasting (with a number of their DJs becoming members of the Radio One team).  There’s no acknowledgement (beyond the ‘Any resemblance to … ‘disclaimer buried in the final credits) that the story is fictional but it is:  the pirate station in the film is ‘Radio Rock’, a synthesis of Radio Caroline and other actual stations.  The Radio Rock DJs are either inventions or derived from real life pirate broadcasters and renamed.  The personnel of the British government responsible for the Marine Offences Act don’t remotely suggest the members of the Wilson government who were actually involved:  they’re presented as generic ‘establishment’ figures and look and sound Tory rather than Labour.

Why does Richard Curtis imply that he’s describing a piece of history then fictionalise the material in this way?    Three obvious reasons are:  (1) to give the piece a self-importance which, without the statistical bookends, it would lack; (2) to exploit what Curtis (no doubt correctly) assumes to be audience’s prejudices against politicians; (3) to evade the rather complex irony that the ‘repressive’ government that made pirate stations illegal was, at just about the same time, legalising abortion, decriminalising male homosexuality and dismantling the censorship powers of the Lord Chamberlain.  (The Government minister responsible for pushing through the Marine Offences Act was Tony Benn, the then Postmaster-General.)  Curtis seems to think that the fictional element gives him carte blanche – for example, to include tracks which hadn’t even been released at the time (such as ‘The Letter’, ‘Elenore’ and ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’).  You wouldn’t mind this so much if the action were placed more vaguely in the sixties but the prologue tells us it’s 1966.

I loathed Love Actually for its pretensions to emotional truth so it was a small relief that most of the early scenes in The Boat were crudely stupid.  You might be watching a Carry On film when a giggling gaggle of well-built girls comes aboard or when the government minister’s creepy-smooth acolyte introduces himself as ‘Twatt – with two Ts’.  In a Carry On, that line would be repeated every time the character opened his mouth – and spoken by an actor with more zest and personality than Jack Davenport has here:  the repetition and the comic identity of the performer would combine to make it funny.   Perhaps someone like Nick Frost, who plays the pirate DJ Dr Dave, is inevitably amusing to a young audience in the way that the Carry On regulars used to be.  I found him monotonous and, like many comic actors of his generation, self-aware and self-approving in front of a camera.  He lacks the skill or the inclination (or both) to conceal the fact that he thinks he’s funny.  As a result, Frost kills the possibility of laughter.

The clumsy inanity is increasingly disrupted as time goes on.  Every so often, Richard Curtis’s sentimental side squirts in a dribble of distress, never enough to leave a residue that might complicate the situation (or the writing) for more than a couple of scenes ahead but enough to make us aware of Curtis’s and our own sensitivity.  One of the pirates, known as Simple Simon (Chris O’Dowd), marries a girl who, the morning after their wedding night, reveals that she’s married him only so that she can be on the ship and share the bed of Gavin, the flamboyantly egotistical big-name DJ who’s recently rejoined the crew.  (This character is played by Rhys Ifans, who seems well cast as an egotist although he’s dead unfunny.)  Simon pulls himself together to go ahead with his show, which he starts by playing ‘Stay With Me (Baby)’.  He mimes tearfully to this and we’re supposed to feel his pain.  It’s clearly unbelievable, in human terms, that what Gavin does to Simon doesn’t affect his relationship with the rest of the team in the long term but, once we’ve had a comic confrontation between Gavin and one of the other DJs, all is forgiven and Simon’s trauma might never have happened.  (Fortunately, Simon’s Pennies From Heaven-style moment isn’t followed up either.  ‘Stay With Me’, which was first released in 1966, is sung by Duffy:  it’s the one newly-recorded number on the soundtrack.)    When the ship is going down, the hippyish Bob ‘The Dawn Treader’ makes uncharacteristically frantic attempts to salvage a cherished LP and we’re happy when he does.  The next moment, one of the others chucks it back into the waters and we’re no longer supposed to care what Bob feels.

As we knew from the indescribable roll call of things-that-make-this-country-great in Love Actually, Richard Curtis seems to be keen on making us feel proud to be British – usually in an archly jocose way.  The prologue describes 1966 as the zenith of British rock ‘n’ roll (although plenty of the music we hear is of course American).  When the station boss Quentin tells his crew the game’s up and, one by one, they stick to their guns, the soundtrack is playing ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.  As the ship eventually sinks and a flotilla of small boats arrives to rescue the pirates, it’s the ‘Dambusters’ march (this Dunkirk moment struck me as insulting to the real thing).   And the British people of 1966-67 are shown as one, big happy family.  Everyone is tuning in to pirate radio – an Asian shopkeeper and pensioners in deckchairs are among those shown grooving along to the music.  Everyone except those wretched men from the ministry!

There are people in the film who are worth watching although many of the cast are so weedy that, when a proper actor is in evidence, you think for a moment that someone has gone wrong:  the impact of accomplished performance is jarring.   When Emma Thompson arrives on the pirate ship for Christmas, she seems to have arrived from another planet.  It’s a mystery as to why Philip Seymour Hoffman agreed to play the role of The Count (the American DJ who was brought onto the team when Gavin left for the US and who is relegated to second billing once he returns) but Hoffman does make bricks without straw:  he’s often funny and The Count’s final, over-the-top broadcast is convincing and touching because it’s delivered in character.  As Quentin, Bill Nighy has some style – verbally and sartorially.  One of the few pleasures in the film is seeing how good some of the actors look in sixties clothes – Nighy, Thompson, Gemma Arterton (a recent Bond girl and Tess of the D’Urbervilles but looking born to wear a mini skirt, although her role is demeaning).  And then there’s January Jones as the one-night-stand wife.  Her ability to express shallow thoughts with piercing clarity (which is the marvel of her performance in Mad Men) makes Jones a distinctive talent.  She uses her extraordinary face here to achieve the look of a sixties fashion icon, which adds to the dazzling brittleness.  (There’s a shot of a Jean Shrimpton poster later in the film to remind you that Jones seems to be a member of the same family.)  As Emma Thompson’s son and Bill Nighy’s godson Carl, who joins the crew after being expelled from school, Tom Sturridge has a pleasing tentativeness in his early scenes – you lose interest once he becomes one of the lads and grows in knowing roguishness.   It’s good to see Kenneth Branagh evidently enjoying himself as the cabinet minister Dormandy (and it’s amusing that he bears some resemblance to Arthur Lowe).  Although this is damning him with very faint praise indeed, Ralph Brown, as the Dawn Treader, is better than he was in Withnail and I.

The Boat That Rocked takes 129 minutes to complete its crappy journey.  (That makes it the same length as The Class and Milk!)    In some ways, it doesn’t seem like a proper film at all.  It’s of no visual interest, except for some of the clothes and the images of albums and singles drowning (which have a melancholy beauty at first but have been done to death by the end).   Curtis devotes close on ten minutes to a hopelessly unfunny sequence when Dr Dave tries to help Carl lose his virginity.   A couple of the evocations of the period are bizarre:  the Emma Thompson character (if Carl is seventeen years old) must have been a liberated raver in the late forties – but she’s presented as if to evoke the new sexual freedoms of the 1960s.   The killjoy duo from the government is reminiscent of the obstructive older generation in early sixties films starring Cliff Richard et al.   At one stage, we seem to be in for a weak pinch from Mamma Mia! – which of the pirates is Carl’s father? – but Curtis doesn’t even bother to sustain this as a running joke-mystery.   The Boat That Rocked may be a paean to the glories of British pop of forty years ago but it’s a dismal indictment of mainstream commercial British filmmaking today.

What’s most frustrating is that Curtis has an interesting subject.  Although the very first scene, in which a young boy listens to his transistor radio under the bedclothes, is obvious, it does hint at the forbidden fruit attractions of pirate radio – but this is never picked up again.  The information given at the start of the film that in 1966 BBC radio programming dedicated only forty-five minutes a week to pop music is misleading in its implication that pirate radio was the only other way pop was broadcast.  Top of the Pops had started in 1964 and the overlap between pop and variety meant that you could often hear current hits on other television shows – as well as on BBC radio shows like Saturday Club and through Radio Luxembourg.  Since the pirate stations were playing largely the same hits, their outlaw status must have been part of their appeal.  And the pirates, both as individuals and as a breed, must have been more interesting characters than Curtis makes them.    He’s been quoted as saying that The Boat isn’t meant to be a depiction of the real story of offshore broadcasting – that that would be a film for someone else to make.  Curtis must know perfectly well that his own efforts – sexist, complacent, pompous and a complete mess – have commercially ruled out the possibility of someone making a different and better film on the subject for a long time.

23 April 2009