Roger Michell (2020)
It’s that time of year again. As awards contenders thin out in the schedules, along come unassuming British heartwarmers to make you laugh and cry. Later this month, it’ll be the turn of Craig Roberts’ The Phantom of the Open, starring Mark Rylance as Maurice Flitcroft, ‘The World’s Worst Golfer’. First, it’s The Duke. Thanks (presumably) to Covid interruptions to normal cinema service in early 2021, it seems to be arriving a year behind time, having premiered at Venice in 2020. In the lead roles are two more Oscar winners, Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren. The film is remarkable too as the last made by Roger Michell, who died last September. It’s par for the post-awards course in that it’s determinedly innocuous – as George Fenton’s perky music immediately announces. Yet the man whose story it tells, and the beliefs that drive him, aren’t innocuous. This may be The Duke’s most infuriating aspect though it’s far from its only one.
The film is named for the Duke of Wellington, whose portrait by Goya was stolen from the National Gallery in London in August 1961 – very soon after the Macmillan government had stepped in to buy the painting, for £140,000, and save it for the nation. (The portrait had recently been purchased by an American art collector who planned to take it across the Atlantic.) The Duke‘s prologue takes place in the Old Bailey, where Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) is standing trial for the theft. Roger Michell then moves into an extended flashback, describing events leading up to the crime, before returning for a courtroom climax. Bunton had for some time waged a lonely, fruitless campaign for free television licences for the elderly, and been jailed more than once for refusing to buy a licence for his own set. He was enraged by how much the government was prepared to spend on a painting. In the wake of the theft, he issued anonymous ransom demands for a donation to charity of £140,000 – to be used to fund TV licences for pensioners unable to afford them.
Government intervention to buy the Goya obviously made headlines though it’s hard to believe it got the sustained TV news coverage The Duke suggests. There’s a mock-up press conference featuring the Home Secretary, Rab Butler (Richard McCabe), and the National Gallery director (Andrew Havill), as well as Pathé newsreel (on television?) – all this on the small screen of a family that can’t only get one channel. Kempton has removed the ‘BBC coil’ from inside the set and thereby, in his view, the only possible objection to not having a licence. The film’s early scenes are among its best. There’s instantly tedious broad comedy as Kempton and his younger son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead) take on Little Hitlerish TV licence-checkers patrolling their terraced street but Kempton’s chronic sounding off gives a fair idea of who he is. Named for the racecourse where his mother backed a good-priced winner, Kempton is an autodidact. He has a low opinion not only of government policy but also of the Duke of Wellington’s treatment of his troops. He regularly sends the BBC not just letters about the licence fee but play scripts knocked out on an ancient typewriter. Thanks to his tongue, he goes through jobs like loaves of bread (the jobs do include a stint in a bakery, as well as cabbing). The combination drives his long-suffering, careworn wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren) up the wall. A more reliable breadwinner, she cleans for well-off Mrs Gowling (Anna Maxwell Martin), as well as keeping her own house in order.
At the start, there’s more than enough scene-setting information. The clerk of the court (Heather Craney) reads the charge sheet, giving the date of the theft as 21st March 1961 [sic]; at the end of the Old Bailey prologue, the screen announces ‘Six months earlier’ then directs us to ‘Newcastle, 1961’. This early attention to chronology comes to seem puzzling, and not just because the film compresses the actual timeframe of events considerably: Kempton Bunton wasn’t arrested or tried until 1965. The screenwriters, Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, are also cavalier in their approach to historical accuracy. Trying to butter up Dorothy, Kempton suggests they go to the pictures to see West Side Story. It’s just as well she pooh-poohs the idea because the film won’t arrive in British cinemas until the following year. The Buntons watch Coronation Street with Jackie, his elder brother Kenny (Jack Bandeira) and their respective girlfriends, Irene (Aimée Kelly) and Pamela (‘Pammy’) (Charlotte Spencer). Keen to make clear she’s above Corrie, Pammy points out that Play for Today will be starting in ten minutes. It won’t actually start for the best part of ten years.
Does this matter? Yes, if you’re setting a story in a specific time and place (and especially if you underline this, as The Duke‘s opening does). Two other questions: how hard would it have been to get these things right and what would have been lost as a result? West Side Story is mentioned only to give contemporary context. It’s not as if Kempton knows the show is one of Dorothy’s favourites – he feels it necessary to tell her it’s Romeo and Juliet in present-day New York. The writers could easily have chosen instead one of the many films you really could see in Newcastle in 1961. As for Play for Today … All Bean and Coleman needed in order for Dorothy to tell Pammy that the Buntons can’t watch BBC was a BBC programme (the free-access online BBC Genome gives comprehensive daily television and radio schedules throughout broadcasting history). In fact, the script didn’t even need a particular programme. If Pammy had simply trotted out ‘I don’t watch the commercial channel’ (a durable mid-twentieth-century tool of social one-upmanship), Dorothy could still have told her there was no option and Pammy’s pretensions could still have been dealt a blow.
I’m making a meal of these errors but they’re symptomatic of larger defects in the facile, lazy screenplay. Kempton and Jackie hide the stolen Goya in the wardrobe of the spare bedroom. When Kenny and Pammy come to stay, they sleep there; one day, Pammy opens the wardrobe and sees the Duke of Wellington’s eyes staring back at her. Hasn’t she looked in the wardrobe before? If not, why now? Answer: because it’s time for her to discover what’s in it. The only reason Pammy is snobbish is to reinforce her place in the story as Bad Girlfriend, just as petty criminal Kenny – an improbable beau for Lady Muck Pammy – is Bad Son. (A quick bit of anal sex against the bedroom wall seems to feature as bizarre confirmation of their Badness.) Though a bigger role than Kenny, Jackie is purely and simply Good Son, the strength of whose devotion to his father goes largely unexplained. Worse still is the plotline around Kempton and Dorothy’s late daughter, Marian, killed some years ago in a cycling accident. Whereas Kempton visits and talks to her grave, grief-stricken Dorothy can’t bear even for Marian’s name to be mentioned. When she discovers Kempton’s latest play-writing effort, ‘Girl on a Bicycle’, Dorothy is horrified. From what Jackie says to his mother, her failure to deal with bereavement is the root cause of tensions and problems in the household. While Kempton is away on trial, Dorothy comes to terms with Marian’s death and her husband’s response to it – just like that. She even visits the grave. Problem solved.
At the trial, the packed public gallery includes some familiar faces. There’s Jackie, Irene (Good Girlfriend) and Javid, Kempton’s colleague from the bakery, who was regularly abused by a racist supervisor: Kempton spoke up for Javid (Ashley Kumar) and was fired as a result. It may not have been easy for any of these three to travel from Newcastle and stay in London during the trial, but the film has by now forgotten the financial challenge of working-class life in the North East, which seemed to matter at the start. Also in the public gallery is Mrs Gowling, who can afford the train fare and is bored with her stifling middle-class existence and husband, a councillor and stalwart of the golf club. She may even have grown tired of her little daughter, though it’s probably safer to assume the film has forgotten about this child too (despite her being played by Roger Michell and Anna Maxwell Martin’s daughter). When a guilty verdict is delivered on the charge of stealing the frame to the Goya portrait the incensed Mrs Gowling launches into a protesting solo of ‘Jerusalem’, which the furious judge, Sir Carl Aarvold (James Wilby), struggles to halt. The protest is premature: the defendant is acquitted on all other charges, including theft of the painting itself, which Kempton has returned (he got three months for stealing the never-recovered frame). And it’s hard not to wonder if Mrs Gowling sings just in order to give Anna Maxwell Martin, wasted in her feeble role, something to do. Yet that burst of ‘Jerusalem’, as dependably middlebrow Roger Michell surely understood, is crucial to The Duke‘s appeal.
The film’s numerous admiring reviewers are nearly all keen to point out that it captures-the-spirit/harks-back-to-the-glory-days of Ealing comedies, which famously championed the eccentric underdog and made fun of a spoilsport establishment. The Duke duly makes a hero of Kempton and its skewering of authority figures is automatic. One of Kempton’s ransom demands is written in verse, rhyming ‘fortitude’ and ‘sportitude’. ‘The man’s a bloody poet’, quips the Home Secretary, ‘perhaps we can lock W H Auden up at last!’ Some of us may feel almost nostalgic for a Tory politician as relatively principled as Rab Butler but the script and Richard McCabe make him suitably unappealing – suitably because Butler is A Politician and, as we know, they’re-all-as-bad-as-each-other (a knowledge that gets you a government led by Boris Johnson). The film derides Sir Joseph Simpson (Charles Edwards), Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, both for abject failure to track down the thief and, years later, for not reopening the case because a further prosecution risks failure and more embarrassment (in reality, Simpson was dead when the latter decision was made). In the courtroom, the judge and the prosecuting counsel (John Heffernan) are standard-issue pompous killjoys, repeatedly wrong-footed. Even a handwriting expert (Sian Clifford), though she gives what seems an accurate psychological analysis of the ransom notes’ author, comes across as somewhat ridiculous. The film-makers appear to subscribe to the view that the people of this country have had enough of experts.
By making this lot ridiculous, The Duke renders them inoffensive and reinforces the link to Ealing, which liked to present the English class system, of which the upper crust and the spunky dissident were both part, as an irresistibly motley crew that, all things considered, rubbed along pretty well. The unignorable difference between the ‘classic’ Ealing comedies and The Duke, however, is the latter’s factual basis. It’s blithely indifferent to historical detail. It’s a roguish, even smug celebration of the supposed British sense of fair play. You often think it might as well be fictional. But the film can’t quite let go of its true-story credentials, affirmed at the start and reiterated, in bogus fashion, at the end. Once the action is over, a legend informs us that free TV licences for the over-75s were introduced in 2000. These weasel words seem designed to suggest Kempton Bunton’s efforts weren’t in vain, though the advent of free licences obviously had nothing to do with him. Bunton died in 1976, barely a decade after standing trial, in obscurity, without obituaries.
Much as I dislike The Duke, I can’t feel the same about Jim Broadbent’s performance. This isn’t just because, as a screen presence, Broadbent is very hard not to like. It’s also down to the actor’s willingness, despite his empathy with the man he’s playing, not to stint on his infuriating qualities. Broadbent conveys how passionately Kempton feels about social injustice; it’s the genuineness of that passion that exposes the cute sentimentality of the film he’s in. It isn’t so difficult to find Helen Mirren annoying but she’s admirable here, especially considering the narrow conception of the role she’s saddled with. She never overdoes exasperated Dorothy’s clenched misery. She also delivers her tart, terse putdowns expertly. The only time I laughed was at Mirren’s contribution to an exchange with Kempton after Dorothy discovers his new play manuscript in the spare bedroom. ‘What were you doing in there?’ he asks. ‘I live here’, she replies.
Kempton’s defence counsel (Matthew Goode) naturally gets kinder treatment than his legal colleagues – a small mercy but a mercy even so, given Jeremy Hutchinson’s distinguished career in public life. (He was also one of Peggy Ashcroft’s husbands, information that enables Kempton to regale counsel with his knowledge of The Cherry Orchard, in which Ashcroft is currently playing Ranevskaya – as she really did, in late 1961.) Hutchinson, who had previously worked for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial, successfully makes the case that, because the Goya has been returned, Bunton is not guilty of its theft, on the grounds that he never meant to keep the painting indefinitely. It’s ironic that what sounds like sophistry invented for dramedic effect is true[1]. But Hutchinson’s clever argument and a couple of bits of irrepressible Kempton playing to the gallery are the only bright spots in the courtroom scenes, which are directed with a sledgehammer touch. It’s soon obvious the defence has decided not to cross-examine prosecution witnesses but Michell never lets up on the yawning pauses before Hutchinson says no questions, each time the judge invites him to ask some. The camera repeatedly fixes on the faces of the judge, the prosecution, the clerk of the court, a sympathetic female juror (Michelle Thomas), giving them all ample time to over-react to key remarks.
The coverage of the theft itself is contrastingly discreet, for good reason: it transpires that Kempton, on his trip to London to lobby the BBC and Parliament, didn’t in fact steal the painting. This is the narrative’s big reveal and it’s well handled. While Kempton is awaiting trial, Jackie informs Dorothy that he was the thief – as it were on his father’s behalf – but that Kempton has insisted on taking the rap. (It was in 1969 that Jackie Bunton eventually made a confession to the police, who decided, on the advice of the Director of Public Prosecutions, not to press further charges.)
Kempton and Dorothy do finally get their outing to the pictures,where they see a spy film rather than a musical. The theft of the Goya portrait had become such a media story that Dr No (1962), the first Bond, really does include a scene in which 007 looks curiously at the painting, which is hanging in the title character’s lair (the copy was painted by production designer Ken Adam). What’s more, the portrait was still missing at the time of Dr No‘s release: it was ‘four years after the theft [that] Bunton contacted a newspaper, and through a left-luggage office at Birmingham New Street railway station, returned the painting voluntarily. Six weeks later, he also surrendered to the police …’ (Wikipedia). Roger Michell’s Dr No postscript is agreeable enough but it’s also typical of the prevailing emollient tone of The Duke. When they see the Goya on the big screen, the Buntons chuckle, at a kerfuffle that’s now safely a thing of the past. If the script had stuck to the real timeframe of events, they would have had to look at Dr No differently – knowing, unlike the rest of the cinema audience, the true location of the Duke of Wellington’s portrait. It’s doubtful either Kempton or Dorothy would have found it a laughing matter.
3 March 2022
[1] According to Wikipedia, ‘In a direct response to the case, Section 11 of the Theft Act 1968 was enacted, making it an offence to remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access’.
