Thea Sharrock (2023)
A title card at the start reads, ‘This story is more true than you’d think’. Wicked Little Letters is indeed based on a real-life case – a poison-pen mystery of the early 1920s in the Sussex seaside town of Littlehampton[1]. A woman called Edith Swan received a succession of abusive letters and postcards, the abuse couched in exuberantly foul language. Edith brought a private prosecution against a neighbour, Rose Gooding, who was convicted of criminal libel and went to prison. After her release, the letters to Edith – and now to other locals – resumed; Rose was tried and convicted a second time. While she was behind bars, the letters started up once more. Scotland Yard was called in and their investigation led to Rose Gooding’s conviction being quashed: she was released from jail and awarded £250 compensation for wrongful conviction. Examinations of handwriting had unmasked the actual culprit – Edith Swan herself. When Edith first stood trial, she was acquitted: the jury couldn’t believe such a respectable woman capable of scurrilous obscenity. The police subsequently devised a sting operation, which involved the use of postage stamps marked with invisible ink, and Edith was caught red-handed. She stood trial again, charged with attempting ‘to send an obscene and libellous letter to the Littlehampton sanitary inspector’. This time, she was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in prison.
That title card’s arch wording announces the persistently waggish tone of Thea Sharrock’s version of events. It was a bad decision to turn them into comedy. For a start, Wicked Little Letters is virtually laugh-free, thanks chiefly to performances that keep insisting what a hoot it is (with the help of Isobel Waller-Bridge’s cod-thriller score). The treatment also makes light of a truly sad story: according even to the film, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) was a miserably repressed spinster and an oppressed daughter, semi-infantilised by her mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) and tyrannised by her father Edward (Timothy Spall)[2]. Although they’re chalk and cheese, Edith at first makes friends with Rose (Jessie Buckley), the Irish immigrant next door, who seems, to drab, churchgoing Edith, an enviably free spirit. The two women fall out when, sorely provoked by Edith’s father and his friends, Rose causes a scene at Edward Swan’s birthday party; she refuses to apologise, after which the abusive letters start. (Rose tends to cuss and swear at the best of times so is an obvious suspect.) The movie is serious in one respect only: its cack-handed determination to be right-on.
As it happens, I spent a weekend in Littlehampton last year. On the evidence of Wicked Little Letters, the place was more ethnically diverse a hundred years ago than it is now. It’s true that plenty of Littlehampton’s citizens of colour in the 1920s are examples of colour-blind casting. Perhaps the people behind the film would claim they all are but, if they did, they’d be kidding themselves – or, more likely, trying to kid the audience. Nearly all the non-white characters are thoroughly and merely nice, including Rose’s Black partner, Bill (Malachi Kirby, wasted in the role). If they’re humorous – like Edith’s sort-of friend Kate (Lolly Adefope) – they’re mildly humorous. The only one who amounts to something more is the sole female officer at the local constabulary, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan). Chief Constable (sic) Spedding (Paul Chahidi) and his inept sidekick PC Papperwick (Hugh Skinner) treat Gladys as a dimwit and a skivvy. She’s anything but. Dubious from the start that Rose wrote the letters, Gladys ignores Spedding’s instruction that she take no further part in the investigation; at the business end of the story, it’s not Scotland Yard but Gladys who proves Edith’s guilt. Anjana Vasan was born in India to a Tamil Hindu family and brought up in Singapore. Her character’s name might seem to confirm that Vasan is colour-blind cast as Gladys Moss yet the film-makers mean us to notice that their heroine is a non-white woman.
And that the victim of injustice in Wicked Little Letters is ethnically (and thereby morally) stigmatised, although the real Rose Gooding wasn’t Irish. In the film Rose claims – it turns out falsely – to be the widow of a soldier killed in the recent Great War: she tells the lie to conceal the fact that her young daughter, Nancy (Alisha Weir), is illegitimate. Jessie Buckley, able actress as she is, doesn’t seem right as Rose – she doesn’t come across as the bog-Irish hoyden offending narrow minds that the set-up seems to demand. Buckley’s more like an in your-face student who’s arrived in Littlehampton from another era rather than another country. Even so, the copious swear words in Jonny Sweet’s script sparked reactions from two posh women just behind me in the Curzon Wimbledon audience that seem to vindicate the film’s Hibernianisation of Rose and suggest that anti-Irish prejudice is still alive and kicking in SW19 a century on. The posh women were convulsed with laughter when profanities issued from the mouth of English national treasure Olivia Colman. They were silent whenever Jessie Buckley swore – as if that’s just what they expected someone Irish to do.
Political correctness ties Wicked Little Letters in knots, though. In reality, the first non-white female officer in the British police served in the Met from 1968 to 1972. Thea Sharrock would probably claim this alone dictates that we view Gladys Moss through a colour-blind lens but it’s practically impossible to do so when gender and anti-Irish prejudice are up-front themes in the film. Gladys’s male colleagues despise her because she’s a woman but we’re meant to ignore the fact that she’s a woman of colour (despite these colleagues being benighted men of a century ago). Rose’s neighbours deplore her Irishness but not that she’s shacked up with a Black man. The film’s broadside against patriarchy – in the form of vicious martinet Edward Swan – is also half-hearted because we learn that Gladys Moss was inspired to join the police by the example of her father, who served in the force for decades. Mr Moss was a paterfamilias very different from Mr Swan, a policeman very different from Spedding and Papperwick. How come – unless it’s because he wasn’t, like them, a white man? (Gladys has a framed photograph of her father in her living room.) Are we really meant to be colour blind to this?
There’s plenty more that doesn’t make sense. Unmarried Edith is the eldest of the Swans’ children – the only one who stayed at home, to the relief of her soppy, needy mother, who’s got her daughter where she wants her. Edith reciprocates Victoria’s love and can see that she’s distraught by the letters that keep landing on the doormat. Yet she doesn’t seem bothered by that until one of the letters causes her mother to collapse and die. If local prejudices against Rose Gooding are as they’re shown to be for most of the film, why is there a prolonged standing ovation for her in court when she’s eventually cleared? The Swan family’s religious devotion is derided throughout as sickeningly pious and/or hypocritical; the only halfway positive aspect of it is the so-called Christian whist group to which Edith (surprisingly) belongs – along with Kate, Ann (Joanna Scanlan) and Mabel (Eileen Atkins). None of these other three is conspicuously Christian (they wouldn’t be, of course, because they’re not baddies). In fact, Ann, Kate and Mabel stand bail for Rose at one point; yet this appears to have no effect on how Edith sees them.
Although it’s mentioned at one point that the Swans are Methodists, the dog-collar at chapel is Father Ambrose (Tim Key), who, if he was a Methodist, wouldn’t be a Father. Gladys mentions to Rose that women doing her job can’t be married and have children as if the police force were especially restrictive in this respect: although Rose is incredulous, this was surely the case for most women in employment until well beyond the 1920s. These examples are fairly typical of Jonny Sweet’s careless writing. A careless writer is what Rose is meant to be – as revealed in another conversation with Gladys, who tactfully suggests Rose’s literacy falls short of the poison pen’s. The script has Rose cheerfully admit to this in one breath and in the next refer to initial letters in sentences being ‘capitalised’. Sweet evidently belongs to the does-it-really-matter-it’s-a-comedy school of screenwriting.
Thea Sharrock takes a similar approach to the material – one that effectively denies Olivia Colman, for all her aplomb, the chance to give Edith Swan the sympathy that she warrants. After her huge and (despite the film) well-merited success in The Favourite (2018), Colman gave another strong performance in The Father (2020) and was a dramatic force to be reckoned with in The Lost Daughter (2021). It’s a shame to see her retreating so soon into a film as tame as this – and tamer than it should be. Timothy Spall is similarly thwarted. At the start he seems just to be overacting; later on, after Swan’s wife’s death, Spall comes through with glints of real malice that give you an unsettling sense of what might have been in his portrait of Edward Swan.
As Gladys, Anjana Vasan is competent but rather bland. It’s potentially arguable that the most successful instance of colour-blind casting here is Paul Chahidi, though this too may be disingenuous on the film-makers’ part. I’m not sure if Chahidi, born in Iran to an Iranian father and a British mother, defines himself as white or non-white. Whichever, there’s no difficulty accepting him here as an establishment figure – chiefly because Chahidi is familiar from television’s This Country as the long-suffering vicar, whom he played so well. He can hardly be at his best in Wicked Little Letters but he’s a fine and versatile comedian. Those two adjectives don’t apply to Hugh Skinner: enough said. The only performer who just about defies the film’s crippling limitations is Joanna Scanlan, as Ann, the pig and chicken farmer who frankly describes her own standards of hygiene as ‘medieval’. It’s regrettable that Scanlan’s richly-deserved BAFTA Best Actress award for After Love in 2022 hasn’t yet resulted in other leading cinema roles. But each character that she plays rings true, however eccentric that character may be. Joanna Scanlan proved that in, for example, Pin Cushion (2018). On a smaller scale and against the odds, she proves it again in Wicked Little Letters.
14 March 2024
[1] Most of the information in this paragraph derives from an article by Ellie Ayton on the Find My Past website (https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/history/wicked-little-letters) rather than the film.
[2] Ellie Ayton’s piece notes that ‘It was speculated at the time of her trial whether Edith was in her right mind when she sent those letters. There may be some truth in this. Sadly, by 1939 Edith was an “incapacitated” patient, living at an institution in Worthing. She died in Worthing in 1959 aged 68.’
