Paul Weiland (2006)

The story is a great idea so it’s all the more frustrating the film’s so poor – and probably ruins the chances of anyone else doing better with the subject in the foreseeable future.  Whatever your feelings about football now, it’s pretty unarguable that 30 July 1966 is the greatest date in English sporting history.  I’ve often been struck by how few films there are set on or around the day England won the World Cup.  There’s the documentary Goal! (1967) of course and the cinema spinoff of Till Death Us Do Part (1969) but I don’t know of anything else.  Sixty Six is about a North London boy whose Bar Mitzvah clashes with the World Cup Final but the divided loyalties scenario goes almost entirely to waste.   The opening credits archly explain that the film is ‘based on a true-ish story’; Wikipedia explains that it’s inspired by the Bar Mitzvah experience of the director Paul Weiland, born in 1953.  Perhaps that’s part of the problem.  Perhaps Weiland, knowing the heart of the material to be true, can’t see what an unconvincing screenplay Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor have made of his experience.

It’s clear from a very early stage this is a script in trouble.   The opening voiceover by the protagonist, twelve-year-old Bernie Rubens, goes on for ages and amounts to an admission of failure:  Weiland and the scenarists can’t set up the boy’s situation or describe the important people in his life in any better way.  I knew what the story was about but I expected Bernie to be caught up in the football and at odds with parents who saw his Bar Mitzvah as the priority.  That would have been an obvious approach, however, and it’s potentially more interesting that he’s committed to preparing for a lavish Bar Mitzvah with a cast of hundreds – that he hates the England team with a passion and is longing to see them knocked out of the World Cup.  The most basic failing of the screenplay is that it never explains why Bernie is so obsessed with the Bar Mitzvah preparations.   Why does he believe it’s the most important day of his life?   It’s true that his elder brother Alvie had a big, successful Bar Mitzvah party two or three years ago but Alvie’s hardly someone for Bernie to look up to in other respects, and he’s not the apple of their parents’ eye.

There’s next to no indication of what Bernie’s disloyalty to England means to the other boys he knows, or any sense of people at school or in his family beginning to think England might win the tournament.  (The fact that the closing stages of the World Cup happened during the summer holidays isn’t really an excuse.)   It was an understandably big deal for many people that England’s opponents in the final at Wembley were West Germany, only twenty years after the end of the War.  Watching the film, it’s hard not to think this must have had a particular poignancy for Jews but this is never hinted at.   At the end of the film, Bernie tells us that, thanks to what happens on the day of the final, he came to accept and love his eccentrically anxious, pessimistic father – as if his inability to do so has been the motor of Sixty Six.  There’s been next to no indication of this: Bernie finds his father socially embarrassing and gets frustrated by his neurotic frugality, but there’s no real antipathy, or even sustained tension, between them.

Sixty Six should be comical and touching but instead of producing these effects it asserts them:  the comedy is cack-handed, the pathos laid on with a trowel.  Of course, the only way out of the dead end the story get into is for Bernie to realise at the eleventh hour that he wants England to win after all.  One of the few decent jokes comes when his father, making an extra-time dash to Wembley with his son, is stopped for speeding by a Scottish policeman who can’t appreciate the patriotic enthusiasm impelling their excessively swift progress.  The film’s climax is emotionally powerful but this is nothing to do with Bernie:  it’s because of what happened in the football – for most English people who can remember the day its uplifting nostalgia is irresistible.  Paul Weiland doesn’t make the most even of this imperishable material:  he omits indelible images like Bobby Moore wiping the sweat off his hands before shaking hands with the Queen and receiving the Jules Rimet Trophy and doesn’t replace them with anything comparably striking (except perhaps for the shot of Jimmy Greaves’ stricken face as he goes through the motions of joining in the celebrations at the end of the final).

The coverage of the football often lacks the remembered texture of the 1966 World Cup.  It’s evident the film-makers haven’t been allowed to use the original television commentaries and mention of England’s crucial quarter-final against Argentina on the Saturday before the final is mysteriously omitted.   In spite of this, the newsreel and television excerpts from the matches hugely overpower everything else.  The next most interesting film is footage of (presumably) Paul Weiland’s own Bar Mitzvah over the closing credits.  Even the mock home-movie recording of Alvie’s Bar Mitzvah has a reality that’s missing from Bernie’s story, which should be the guts of the film.

Although he’d directed features before this, Paul Weiland made his name in television sketch comedy (Alas Smith and Jones, Mr Bean) and it shows:  he completely fails to orchestrate the actors.   He allows Catherine Tate, for example, as Bernie’s Aunt Lila, to do a hideously obvious Jewish caricature.  (Aunt Lila is an inept cook so she must do all the catering for the Bar Mitzvah.)   Richard Katz, as the blind rabbi who instructs Bernie in the Torah, is unbearable and Stephen Rea can’t do much with Dr Barrie, who treats Bernie for asthma:  the scriptwriters seem to forget who this character is between one scene and the next.  Gregg Sulkin, in the main part, is a rather opaque performer, although he makes Bernie’s increasing unhappiness strong enough to be infectious (and, if his voice isn’t being dubbed, he sings well and affectingly at the Bar Mitzvah service).

Eddie Marsan is such an odd-looking man that, as the melancholic paterfamilias Manny, he doesn’t need to do much to be a picture of paranoid misery and he plays the part with integrity.   But with so many crude cartoons around him, the effect of Marsan’s truthfulness makes the character of Manny tonally incongruous (and there’s one moment in his performance which seems really wrong:  when the inveterately gloomy Manny decides to be light-hearted at Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah he settles into the rhythms of telling a joke too easily – so that when someone else interrupts with the punchline it doesn’t work).   What I did like, however, was that the unprepossessing, socially incompetent Manny had a beautiful wife, Esther.  Helena Bonham Carter plays the role intelligently.  With the possible exception of Peter Serafinowicz, as Manny’s more gregarious and presentable brother, Bonham Carter is the only performer nuanced enough to negotiate the script’s shortcomings.  She somehow makes you believe that Esther would have been drawn to, and stayed with, Manny because of his doomed obsessiveness.  It drives her mad but it’s a big part of what makes her keep loving him.

30 September 2011