James Cellan Jones (1983)

This television film, part of ITV’s All For Love series and based on a William Trevor short story, has a sad and terrible subject:  how children become (or at any rate used to become) embarrassed by their parents in public, especially by the mothers who are our first world.  The difference between these two planes of existence is thrown into relief in Mrs Silly by the fact that Michael’s parents are divorced and his thrusting executive father John has set up home with a new, younger wife, Gillian.  They have twin daughters, large dogs, a big house, a car which impresses Michael’s contemporaries at the prep school to which his father has insisted on sending him (John went to the same school).  That’s a wrench not just for Michael himself but for his mother Florence, with whom he lives in a poky flat.  Florence – who calls herself Mrs Silly because she keeps getting things wrong – is hard up after her divorce.  She has a part-time office job for a small local business.  When Michael, back from school for the Christmas holidays, is alone at home with his mother he loves it and her.  (He doesn’t look forward to spending time with his father and John’s new family.)  But when his mother visits him at school and Michael shows her round and she keeps saying the wrong thing too loudly and rattles on to the headmaster about people in her life back home whom the head doesn’t know from Adam.  Michael is mortified.

His shame is burningly intensified at the climax to the story.  Florence, John and Gillian all turn out for the confirmation of Michael and some other boys in the school chapel.  At the reception that follows in the Great Hall, his mother slips on the parquet floor – thanks to some sticky remnant of the afternoon tea that’s lubricated the sole of her shoe.  She falls flat on her back in front of the many assembled guests – the bishop who’s conducted the confirmation service, the headmaster and other staff, Michael’s school friends and their families.  Afterwards, his father and Gillian take Michael to dinner at a posh local hotel.  His mother has returned to the bleakly inexpensive bed and breakfast she always stays at when she visits (cruelly named ‘Sans Souci’).   John asks his son if he wants to pop in and say goodbye to Florence.  Michael, who can’t bear to face (or be faced by) his mother, replies that he’s already said goodbye.   That night in the dorm, he sobs.  When his friend in the bed next to him asks if he’s crying, Michael says no – that he’s got a cold.  (We saw him making desperate attempts to convince matron the night before that he had a temperature and wasn’t well enough to attend the church service.)    The other boy reflects on what a splendid day it’s been and how funny it was when that old woman fell over – was she related to Michael?   ‘Some kind of aunt, I think,’ he answers.  Although it’s hours still to cockcrow, he’s already denied her twice.

This intolerable finale is emotionally powerful but there are fundamental errors in Bob Larbey’s adaptation and James Cellan Jones’s direction.  William Trevor’s story really does dramatise the trauma of a child-becoming-adolescent’s separation from the safe, interior world of his mother.  It’s a third-person narrative but Trevor tells the story through Michael’s consciousness:  although we realise how shaming the growing boy finds his mother in public, we can’t be sure how much his sensitivity and anxiety to protect her from the outside world she’s strayed into are colouring his view.  Larbey and Cellan Jones (the latter, now in his eightieth year, introduced the screening of Mrs Silly at BFI) don’t replicate this ambiguity.  We watch and listen to Florence’s gaffes and her interlocutors’ disdainful or squirming reactions and it leaves nothing to the imagination:  she is unarguably embarrassing.  As a result, what happens at the school reception isn’t the new and indelibly shocking realisation – validation – of Michael’s fears that it is in the short story.  (Surely there’s a pun in the fact that this happens on the day that the boy is confirmed.)  The film’s climax is both weaker than it should be and upsetting in the wrong way:  because Florence has been shown as so insistently ridiculous, visiting this culminating humiliation on her comes over as unkindly excessive.

This heavy-handed approach is epitomised by the hat which Florence wears to the confirmation day events in the film.   In Trevor’s version, she’s hatless – to Michael she seems shamefully dowdy (and poor) in view of the headgear around her but she’s still, until the tea, publicly inconspicuous.  Cellan Jones has her in a bright red hat with a large red feather:  every other woman there is bare-headed so that Florence is a focal point even in the chapel.  It makes no sense at all:  this pathologically flustered woman, desperately lacking in self-confidence, wouldn’t be seen dead trying to make a spectacle of herself.  The hat could have worked only if she’d consciously decided to throw caution to the winds:  as it is, Cellan Jones keeps in a scene when Florence tries it on for her boss and the younger woman she works with and seeks their assurance that it looks all right.  It’s patently ridiculous but they don’t tell her that – even when she expresses her anxiety to do things right, not to be Mrs Silly on this very special occasion, on this day she wants to be perfect.  Thin-as-a-rail, highly-strung Maggie Smith is texturally very different from the plump, fluffy woman of the short story but in the early scenes her vital eccentricity is subdued:  knowing what was coming, I was fearful that she would be convincing and too upsetting.   But this doesn’t last long:  Maggie Smith isn’t ordinary – even without that wrong-headed hat she would be noticeable.  This came as a relief:  the histrionics made Florence’s tragedy less raw.  (There wouldn’t have been this distancing effect with, say, Judi Dench in the part.)  Smith plays Florence with great skill and sympathy – but sympathy is what it is:  she feels sorry for Mrs Silly.

One of the strengths of the film, however, is that other characters do the same – and that Cellan Jones presents them sympathetically:  John and Gillian are much more interesting as a consequence.   In his opening scene with Maggie Smith, Michael Culver as John looks as if he might be shaping up for a predictable caricature but he resists the temptation and ends up giving a very good performance.  He’s physically convincing, especially in the way he wears his clothes (like a tailored, close-fitting overcoat as he chats confidently outside the chapel).   It’s not easy to see how the socially alert and ambitious John ever got together with the accident-prone Florence, a vicar’s daughter from out in the sticks.  (It would help if you could believe that she’d once been conventionally very pretty but you can’t.)  Even so, at home with Gillian (well played by Deborah Grant), Culver’s John is surprisingly affecting as he talks about how things have gone wrong for Florence.    The NFT2 audience lapped up James Villiers as the headmaster because, on the surface, he suggests a familiar type – but this character (we notice, for example, that the head recognises each boy in the school) and Villiers’s playing of it are more thoughtful than you might expect.  The same goes for Cyril Luckham as the bishop.  Best of all (and a triumph of sensitive direction) is the dark-haired, dark-toned Adrian Ross Magenty as Michael.  He beautifully expresses the torture of the boy’s confused loyalties and is able to seem both childish and spiritually older than either of his parents.   Michael’s final disowning of his mother is extremely moving because we can see how much he loves her.

1 October 2010