by Allan Fish
(UK 2006 93m) DVD1
Call me Frank
p Helen Flint d Tom Hooper w Peter Morgan ph Danny Cohen ed Melanie Oliver m Robert Lane
Jim Broadbent (Lord Longford), Samantha Morton (Myra Hindley), Lindsay Duncan (Lady Elizabeth Longford), Robert Pugh (Harold Wilson), Andy Serkis (Ian Brady), Kika Markham (Governor Wing), Anton Rodgers (Willie Whitelaw),
The names won’t be familiar to people in the US; Keith Bennett, Leslie-Anne Downey, Pauline Reade, John Kilbride and Edward Evans. Yet ask the British public to name the most reviled person or persons in British criminal history, not just in the 20th century but of all time, then the winner, if that’s the correct term, would be Myra Hindley. The Wests killed more, Dr Shipman many more by pharmaceutical proxy, Crippen, Christie and Sutcliffe were infamous, the original Jack legendary, yet none would come close.
From 1963 to 1965, the A635 became an all too real Highway to Hell where Ian Brady and Myra Hindley beat and murdered five children before being sent to prison for life. They were ushered away after sentencing by the presiding judge not with the words “take them down” but “put them down”; their chances of release somewhat less than nil. The one man who thought differently was the former leader of the House of Lords, famous philanthropist Lord Longford, who saw Hindley as merely another one of his prisoners seeking redemption. He spent much of his later life campaigning for her parole and Peter Morgan’s screenplay tells that story.
It’s impossible now to recreate the feeling of murderous hatred felt by the public towards these two human monsters. For Morgan and director Hooper to even attempt to make a drama out of it and be subjective might be seen as a lunacy to rival Longford’s campaigning on Hindley’s behalf. It’s a film whose argument rests on several moral quandaries, not just that of forgiveness and redemption, but the simple but vital distinction between what’s understandable and what’s justifiable. Morgan’s greatest single achievement is that he successfully plays with our conventions and turns them against us. Take the scene where Longford first goes to visit Hindley and sees, from the back, a peroxide blonde and thinks it’s her, due to the only picture we have of her being her post-interview police photo. Then, from the next seat, up pops a quiet, dowdy, dark-haired woman with monotone Lancashire accent who looks like you could say boo to her and she’d run off. Morgan, Hooper and Morton daring us to be drawn in; their characters and the hopelessness of the situation summed up in that first exchange. He shows all of his “endearing childlike qualities” when he observes “what a pretty smile you have” like a guileless visitor to a primary school. When Hindley replies with candour “have you forgotten who I am?”, there’s no psychotic pride there, or at least if there is it plays second fiddle to her being so gobsmacked at what she can only see as his naivety.
As the eponymous do-gooder, Broadbent gives his finest performance, capturing seemingly effortlessly the man who was, as it turns out, mistaken in judging others by his own standards. He’s the soul of the film in a film about the soulless, and the credit to Samantha Morton cannot be overestimated. In a fiendishly complex perfornance, she captured from that very first scene, to use that grossly overused phrase, the banality of evil. By the end, Hindley and the nonagenarian lord have become the opposite ends of a good and evil spiritual level, the latter finally perhaps understanding, if with horror, the spirituality, black though it may be, of the compulsion to do evil. A compulsion shared by Brady, who in two scenes is played with such a feral, calculating intensity by Serkis as to rival Hopkins’ Lecter, meeting Longford like a king granting audience to an inferior. And from out of the darkness, the nauseating sounds emanating from an old cassette tape, the shushes aimed at terrified children and the look of horror on the face of the listener. It’s like staring death in the face and being told, in a very dull quiet voice with eyes that pierce right through you even when not looking at you directly, “sit down.”
This was shown on HBO in the States a few years back. I thought it was exceptionally well acted by Broadbent and Morton. There is a line that Morton delivers in her final meeting with Broadbent that haunts me to this day: “Evil can be spiritual, too.”
Really compelling write-up. I’m not familiar with the film or the events it describes but you’ve intrigued me.
MOVIEMAN-You don’t know what you are missing if you haven’t seen this one. THE KINGS SPEECH amounts to a primer course when considering Tom Hoopers most popular work and this is clearly, between the two films, the greater. Allan is spot-on with his assessment of the film and the themes it analyzes (about some people believing EVIL can be SPIRITUAL) and Broadbent has never been better with his title portrayal. The fire of the piece is Samantha Morton, however, and every moment she is on screen acts as a crash course on how to play silent and humble psychopathy. I caught this one through Netflix after Allan had originally reviewed this film a few years back and I cannot tell you how impressed and engrossed I was with the resulting film. I’d put this up there with RED RIDING TRILOGY as one of the very best pieces on heinous crime brought to the screen in several decades.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS seems like a childrens fairie tale in comparison (although, the more I think about the themes of that film the more I think that WAS the intent of the writer and the director). If any American film has a link to the same themes that are brought to the fore in LONGFORD, then it is, most certainly, David Fincher’s SEVEN in which the killer of the piece pontificates a kind of ordered thinking and moral objective to not only the crimes he commits, but the spirituality that is needed to forge ahead with the crime of murder for what he thinks is “the greater good”.
What makes LONGFORD resonate even more than most films that explore these same themes is that the story is 100% true.
Chilling and fascinating at the same time, you’d be doing yourself a big dis-service by not putting this title to the top of your list on netflix and seeing it as soon as possible…
In many ways I think this could be Morton’s very best performance. I know that’s saying alot considering MOVERN CALLAR, SWEET AND LOWDOWN and IN AMERICA (and she was the best thing in Spielberg’s under-appreciated MINORITY REPORT)… But, take a look and see if I’m wrong.
Dennis – Your comments, as always,are spot on and elightening. I would add, however, that it wasn’t only the portayal of evil that made LONGFORD so compelling, but also the way the film depicts Longford’s stubborn, near-incomprehensible notions of Christian love without really telling us how to feel about them. I recall a moment late in the film, even after Hindley’s guilt is beyond question, that Longford warmly thanks her for “the pleasure of having got to know you.” It’s a stunning comment, but in Broadbent’s brilliant performance, you can see both dangerous naivete and an unquenchable, even admirable, Christian conviction of the value of every human life.
What with Tom Hooper in the spotlight these days for his ‘controversial’ direction of LES MISERABLES and also for his award winning work on THE KING’S SPEECH, it’s well-timed to have this critically-praised item on view.