We’ve a new national paean, apparently. Richard Curtis has spoken, and The Ballad of Wallis Island, a comedy currently in cinemas, is “one of the ten greatest British movies of all time”. By this, Curtis means he has passed the flame to his chosen successor in soft storytelling power. It’s easy to see why he’s chosen this over the countless offerings of Guy Ritchie, or one of the Kingsman movies. Swashbuckling, cheeky, triumphant patriotism is not what our cultural elite want nor even recognise as a reflection of British character. Instead, the great British story on offer here is one of nostalgic retreat and self-pity.
The film shows Tim Key, the archetypically middle-class darling of the BBC, playing an everyman, Charles Heath, who is not quite depressed, but nonetheless downtrodden. Charles has won the lottery twice, lost his wife, and moved to a remote island in Wales. This is where the action takes place, between his house, an empty beach, and the phone box outside the village shop. There’s not much in the way of plot, with the film’s appeal coming more from the soundtrack, the cardigans, and the rain, but after Charles has coaxed the two estranged members of his favourite band into travelling to the island and staying in his house, there is a will-they-won’t-they type romance as the band re-learn their old songs and rehash their old relationship in the run-up to a much-anticipated private gig.
It has all the trappings of a sweet and wholesome tale about two individuals, clearly once deeply in love, at last given a chance to overcome the tragic twist of fate that has left them all so lonely. But the film is not wilful enough for that. Not one of the characters has it in them to make so decisive a move. Gone is the Britain of the Italian Job, where chutzpah and self-belief could turn a coach full of gold hanging off a cliff into a perfect, still very happy, ending. The lesson of Ballad, by contrast, is that when you find yourself facing one of life’s many hurdles you are better off not even trying, accepting that you never really had it in you. When the film does momentarily brighten, and the possibility of love dawns, and the pace of the music picks up, and the characters’ expressions finally lighten, the sense of potential, so elegantly created, is crudely banished. The woman tells the man that he is “in love with a past that is now gone” and that “it is time to grow up”.
A perfectly sensible sentiment, you might think. Grounded. Realistic. But is that really what we need in the pantheon of great British film? A story about a people who have had their time and are now content to listen to their favourite songs while ticking off the days? It is not so much a national panegyric as the assisted-dying vision of our country and its future.
Film and TV are too often seen as a medium for light-entertainment, a facilitator of relaxation. While movies and shows should, of course, be both pleasant to watch and entertaining, they are also the dominant repository of character study and story in the modern world, making what they depict and how they do so a matter of genuine importance. There is something to the idea that art paints a nation’s soul, and there is something to the Wildean notion that life imitates art. Stories give body to what are otherwise abstract and amorphous intuitions. They flesh out our perceptions of ourselves, give us touchstones by which to work out who we are or could become, and in doing so they inspire us. At their best, stories are our principal pipeline to the transcendent realm of what might be, and as such they are the surest reserve of aspiration and hope we have.
Henry VII tried tapping into this as far back as 1486 when naming his son, Arthur, after a unifying folk hero to legitimise the Tudor throne. The British government did the same when they sponsored Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V in 1944. Also in the Forties, the country’s wartime spirit was fed by Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and A Matter of Life and Death — patriotic as well as subtly progressive and profound. And then there is Richard Curtis, the director who most gave us our fin-de-siècle swagger, an End of History, Cool Britannia-themed glow-up to the legacy left by the Powell and Pressburger films mentioned above.
We love Hugh Grant rom-coms because they get something fundamental right. They present that unique and wonderful thing, English charm, which is difficult to pin down, but encapsulated in Britain’s Nineties and Noughties soft-power arsenal: Harry Potter, Paddington, Bridget Jones, Mr Bean. This charm — a combination of self-deprecation, understatement, irony and natural beauty — itself relies upon deep-seated security; and at risk of ruining it for those liable to let intellectual explanations corrupt otherwise innocent and natural feelings, this security derives from the fact that we once ruled the world. We could be self-mocking because, deep down, we knew we were superior; we could be madcap and eccentric because we were also very capable; and we could be indulgently scenic because the beautiful and well looked-after cityscapes and landscapes were there waiting to be filmed. Which isn’t to say that good art relies upon a good old Empire, only that we used to use what we had to produce things that went beyond the sum of their parts.
Ballad doesn’t do that. Its island is an allegory for deep depression, with the sun rising and setting on a soggy little world where nothing really changes. It is a future that could very well be in store for us. A lot of our problems have come from complacency and excessive politeness; we haven’t been willing to tackle problems head-on, speak up about things we think are wrong, and do the painful and costly work required to get ourselves back on track. But why immortalise the worst aspects of ourselves in film? I’ve heard rumours that Stephen Daldry and Ridley Scott are in a race to create a new Battle of Britain, which could well do the trick. But we need not even go that far. Spitfires dancing over English fields while downing Germans helps, but it was never just the planes giving the film its appeal. It presents a solid and proud vision of who and what we are. Do that and you’ll have a film that will unite Boomers, Britpoppers, Zoomers, Deanos and Gen Alphas to come in a way that a tale like Ballad never could. The closest thing we’ve got is Guy Ritchie, whose genuine popularity has, of course, ensured that he’s never been given the credit he deserves.
His recent MobLand is the latest in a string of series that show him to be imagining on a national scale. It follows the story of Harry Da Souza (played by Tom Hardy), a lovable, cold, brutal fixer navigating a labyrinthine world that connects England’s aristocratic thugs, spoilt brat children and underclass lackeys with European smugglers, Mexican drug runners, American empire builders and corrupt representatives of global law and finance. It follows, of course, the old Ritchie formula — (1) meet an outsider hero with a debt and his motley crew, all of whom have regional accents and memorable names; (2) watch rapid-fire subplots unravel; (3) now see it all escalate stylishly to a Prodigy-heavy soundtrack before the drama peaks in a pub/warehouse/manor house shootout, and we close with an ironic epilogue that reveals the sly winner you can learn more about in the sequel. But at least the show is vital and composed of people still very much alive. For every snob slagging it off as more of the same, cheap TV propped up by the even cheaper thrill of violence, you can guarantee there are two more viewers watching with a quiet joy in their hearts. Damning and bloody as Ritchie’s England is, he is at least giving us a portrait of a country that is if not worthy then demanding of respect.
We could do with a bit of inspiration. We don’t need depressing tales about depressed people who think their better days are behind them when they’ve barely reached 40. It’s not comforting, it’s belittling. It’s not funny, it’s surrender. It’s time we reembraced our Michael Caine swagger and innate self-confidence and created something that could inspire a new wave of cocksure young men from the provinces to come to London and find fancy girlfriends in the way Notting Hill did; or that could revive our love for the land and taste for the quaint and quiet glory immortalised in The Detectorists; or that could inject some aspiration into our nobly establishment-wary youth, and trigger Italian Job-like missions that see them go off on North Sea oil-drilling excursions or try to claim some land in the Antarctic.
We might have lost control a bit in recent years, but why get off the coach and let the gold fall now?
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Author: Henry Cochrane
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