Joel Hopkins (2017)
Diane Keaton and Brendan Gleeson make it not just watchable but suspenseful. Can they, as well as holding the audience’s attention, keep their integrity as actors? The answer – amazingly, in the circumstances – is yes, in both cases. At seventy-one, Keaton remains just about incapable of emotional falsity on screen and an effortless physical comedienne: she has only to cross a street, let alone teeter across a sylvan knoll, to make you smile. Gleeson’s bulk and the subtle precision of his facial expressions and line readings are, as always, an impressive combination. You end up admiring the pair’s unerring, sympathetic good taste as actors, while regretting that they chose to appear at all in a film like Hampstead.
The inspiration for Donald Horner (Gleeson) is a real person, Harry Hallowes. After eviction from his Highgate council flat in 1987, Hallowes, born in County Sligo in the 1930s, set up a makeshift home in a corner of Hampstead Heath. When property developers tried to evict him some twenty years later, he successfully claimed squatter’s rights and a court awarded him the title deeds to the plot of land he occupied, valued at the time at around £2 million. Hallowes, who became known as ‘Britain’s richest tramp’, died in early 2016. His eccentric lifestyle and defeat of the powers-that-be evoke Ealing comedies and Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – but that’s where the similarities between these estimable antecedents and Hampstead end. Joel Hopkins and the screenwriter Robert Festinger have grafted onto the tale of Harry Hallowes’s legal triumph a feeble romance, between Donald Horner and Emily Walters (Keaton), a recently widowed American, running out of funds to pay the mortgage on her apartment in a house on West Heath Road. Since Emily, from the start, feels alien among her snotty neighbours, her gravitation towards Donald lacks even the usual amusements of a lady-and-the-tramp affair.
Although Hampstead makes fun of NW3 residents and their culture, it still seems to be promoting the area – presumably with the transatlantic box office in mind. In the map of films named for actual places, the territory is close to Notting Hill for reasons beyond geographical proximity. Several critics have described Hampstead as a ‘sub-Richard Curtis movie’: that’s close to a contradiction in terms but you see what they mean. Much of the dialogue, whether satirical or ‘heartfelt’, has a ring of self-approval similar to Curtis’s. There’s also the soupçon of political earnestness – enough for Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard to say that it’s ‘nice to see London’s housing crisis being discussed’, though being mentioned would be more accurate: in the opening scene, the words ‘affordable housing’ occur during a radio news bulletin. Another snippet of radio news, though barely audible, delivers just about the best topical joke in the script: after Horner wins the court case and the title deeds, the media dub him ‘Donald Tramp’.
The list of talented people wasting their time in Hampstead also includes James Norton, Lesley Manville, Jason Watkins, Adeel Akhtar, Phil Davis, Deborah Findlay and Rosalind Ayres. Their roles are so puny that, with the exception of Akhtar, they all tend to overplay but their theatrical expertise is kind of pleasurable in itself – even if I couldn’t tell whether the glibness Norton radiates as Emily’s mercenary son was a reflection of the character or the actor. The cast also includes Simon Callow, not as annoying as he might be as the judge in the court case, and Alistair Petrie, abominable as the ‘bad’ barrister, after being one of the better things in The Night Manager last year. As a nice-but-dim good cause addict, whose latest project Donald Horner becomes, Hugh Skinner is as one-note – and the same note – as he was playing the intern in W1A. The soundtrack is lathered in twinkly music by Stephen Warbeck.
27 June 2017
