There is an art to profanity in film and television. It’s easy for a writer or an actor to simply insert ‘fuck’ after every other word, but if the point is to punctuate a dialogue or shock the audience this doesn’t amount to much. There needs to be something spontaneous or creative to the explicit language for it to really transcend. The British political satire The Thick of It was a notable masterclass in pronounced inventive swearing, with the colourful turns of phrase coming out of the mouth of Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker extraordinarily memorable.
Usually of course, cursing isn’t really a substantive aspect of a movie enough for this to mean anything -but occasionally one will indulge, at which point it does matter. And something like Martin Scorsese’s Casino is pretty good. Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters is less so. This is a movie where the profanity is a primary gimmick, as it revolves around the circulation of vulgar letters from a mystery source in a stuffy 1920s English village. And yet the movie rarely ever is appalling or subversive for this -indeed it feels safe, downright conservative at times.
It is based quite loosely on a true story from Littlehampton, and a scandal of insulting, profane letters being received all through the community. The movie sold itself on being a squabble between two women escalating out of control, but it’s not actually what the movie is. For a portion of the story in fact, Olivia Colman’s chronically repressed Edith Swan and Jessie Buckley’s rambunctiously crass Rose Gooding, are friends -it’s Edith’s father Edward (Timothy Spall) and the elders of the community who are more offended by the Irish immigrant and her openly crass attitude. But an incident at a party puts an end to their relationship, and the mean letters to the Swans start arriving shortly after.
In terms of the conflict this creates between the two women, it’s very subdued. In fact they have only marginally more screen-time together than they did on their last collaboration, The Lost Daughter -in which if you’ll recall, playing the same character, they never shared a scene. Though the film is fundamentally about the two of them, they don’t interract much after the letters begin appearing -Rose is hauled off to jail for a few months in their immediate aftermath, and then spends much of the rest of the movie defending herself. Indeed the mystery of who’s actually writing the letters and the importance of clearing Rose’s name becomes the primary plot point in the hands of the intuitive ‘Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss’ (Anjana Vasan) -a mystery that is resolved to the audience before too long, leaving Moss and Rose to play catch-up.
And this as a hook is pretty weak, deferring the thrust of the action from the movie's stars to the mostly deadpan Moss and a trio of sidekicks played by Joanna Scanlen, Lolly Adefope, and Dame Eileen Atkins of all people -each good performers but without much to work with here. Meanwhile any edge is gradually sanded off of Buckley's performance as the movie attempts to seriously grapple with her pariah status and the wrong committed against her. Rose has a young daughter, which facilitates the movie casting her as an archetype; the confrontational irresponsible working-class mother articulated with greater honesty by Eve Hewson in Flora and Son and Buckley herself in Wild Rose. As for Colman, she is vastly underutilized by a script that doesn't find nearly the psychological depth she reaches for. Her role in the story changes as she is framed with less sincerity, but she remains fundamentally flat as a character.
Her casting is also not nearly as subversive as seems to be the intent. If the idea is to create entertainment out of a respectable prestige actress saying foul and profane things, it fails on two fronts. One, in that Colman’s provocative language is actually fairly downplayed -her character’s reputation is more modest and proper, and so offending diatribes from her come up on only a few spare occasions compared to Buckley or even the blisteringly harsh Spall -probably the best performance of the movie quite honestly. And two, Colman is no stranger to vicious cursing -she did so in her Oscar-winning performance and she’s quite good at it. Indeed this movie doesn’t take advantage enough of her propensity in this regard. But for shock value, someone like Kate Winslet or Emily Blunt would have had a greater effect.
The coarseness is a red herring though, as nothing else in the movie rises to any equivalent level of objectionability. Even with a story of scandal, Wicked Little Letters is very tame. Sharrock comes from a background directing theatre, and perhaps that is why the filmmaking is fairly wooden -focusing on the actors and their immediately relevant environment, without any notworthy visual traits to colour either the world in which they move or their movements themselves. This banality of aesthetic is matched by a banality in tone, where the movie is simply content to play its emotional and narrative beats safely, creating stakes that don’t have much weight and no substantive comment on the historical incident or figures involved. Outside of the bursts of curses, there isn’t much smart or effective humour to the piece, and even within those, the onslaught isn’t as dense or flamboyant as it could be. One extreme example towards the end is delivered so fastly by Colman it’s actually hard to make out what all she’s saying -swears and vulgar references blending into mere gibberish.
It was surprising to see that the BBC wasn’t involved in this movie (though it is co-produced through Film4), given that it seems very much like a work made for television. This is mostly down to the mystery plot, which in its cast and formula feels very much of a piece with the extensive British period detective show industry -this was also true of the lame mystery See How They Run a few years back. Not every movie has to have arbitrary scale of course, but there should be some sense of the medium that I don’t identify in Wicked Little Letters. At the end of the day, it’s just an underdeveloped costume comedy that makes a little use of its talent (notably Spall and Buckley to an extent), but isn’t ultimately much of anything. The story of this letter scandal itself is curious and could have made for a worthy adaptation, but it needed some distinct attribute and a much stronger bite.
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