Everyman Bristol
"For the satirical rogue says here that old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber or plumtree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with weak hams — all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down. "
"Deconstruction" is when you take a book that makes perfect sense and spot some incredibly subtle way in which it contradicts itself. Often by looking in the margins.
This film ambles a long quite amiably for an hour and twenty minutes, full of overheard dialogue and people muddling along in quiet desperation and northern accents. Exactly what you'd expect from Mr Alan Bennett. And then, in the last fifteen minutes, it performs a complete left turn and becomes an entirely different kind of movie. Or, possibly, reveals itself to have been a completely different kind of movie all along. Fair play to Mr Bennett: all the groundwork for the backflip has been laid in advance, and it could very well be that this is one of those films which reads entirely differently on a second viewing. But one sits through the closing credits going "But...but...but....what?" It is not the sort of film which has a post-cred.
There is a monumentally ill-judged and corny epilogue which may be trying to pull the two entirely different films together. (Thesis, antithesis, and all that.) But having spent the last several hours thinking about it -- and I freely admit that I think harder about bad good movies than about good bad movies -- it occurs to me that the two unequal halves may, after all be saying the same thing; or at least, grappling with the same themes. Is that the opposite of deconstruction?
There is nothing the internet hates more than spoilers, so you will have to take my word for it. Bruce Willis turns out to be a sledge.
So: we're in the Bethlehem Hospital, known to the staff as "the Beth" as opposed to, say, Bedlam. (Is there a subtext that suggest that we the audience have basically come to gawp at the freaks?) All the rooms are named after famous women: "Shirley Bassey" is the geriatric ward and "Joan Collins" is a bathroom. This is neither explained nor commented on. (Is this a signal that we are in the realm of the surreal and shouldn't quite take things literally?)
There is an agonisingly saintly doctor, played by Bally Gill (30). He is known as Doctor Valentine, partly because the white people can't say his Indian name and partly for reasons which are spelt out rather too clearly at the end. (In the original stage play the doctor was played by Sacha Dhawan, which some of us would have found incredibly confusing.) There is a calmly efficient senior nurse, Sister Gilpin (Jennifer Saunders (64)) who is obsessed with hygiene, much too frank about bodily functions ("was it urine or faeces"?) but, beneath her cynical exterior, genuinely cares about the patients. It's not entirely clear what kind of institution the Beth is meant to be. The patients are being treated for specific conditions -- falls and infections and "lymphomania" and Sister Gilpin is perpetually fending off phone calls from other hospitals in desperate need of beds. But the craft activities and memory workshops and a choir (shades of History Boys) make it seem more like an old folks home than a geriatric ward in a general hospital.
The patients are poignantly elderly English eccentrics played by poignantly elderly English actors. Judy Dench (88) is a retired librarian who doesn't care much for books but does like keeping things in order. When Doctor Valentine shows her how to use an I-Pad ("no, swipe it with more gentleness") she remarks that it is "no thicker than a monthly periodical." Derek Jacobi (84) is a retired schoolmaster (as opposed to a teacher) who can define tmesis and introduces Dr Valentine to the Charles Causley poem about hospital visitors. ("The last visitor is not usually mentioned.") David Bradley (81) is plain speaking and northern and was a tallyman before the mines closed and still goes on and on about the Strike. If Maggie Smith (88) had been available they would have had the set.
It is all very amusing and sad and touching but there is just a slight sense that we are eavesdropping a retirement home for literary stereotypes rather than actual people. Even Jennifer Saunders can't quite shake the memory of Hattie Jaques saying "Have you been?" Almost inevitably, David Bradley's son is a right wing management consultant who advised the Health Minister that the Beth should be closed in the name of efficiency. He is predictably gay which his father finds predictably hard to accept; but their relationship predictably thaws and he predictably has a Damascene conversion about leaving smaller hospitals open. (He's played by Russel Tovey (41) who is disconcertingly older than he was when he was in his twenties.) One old lady, not quite in possession of a full set of faculties, is accompanied by an abrasive son and daughter who complain about everything and threaten to sue the hospital when their 92 year old mother passes away peacefully in her sleep. It transpires that their main concern was that she should survive long enough to avoid inheritance tax. In case we miss the point, the son is carrying a copy of the Daily Express with the headline "WHAT ON EARTH HAS THIS COUNTRY COME TO."
Everything develops pretty much as you would expect. Doctor Valentine and Derek Jacobi bond over modern poetry; Sister Gilpin brashly tries to cut David Bradley's wedding ring off, but the Doctor gently removes it with grease; there is embarrassment about showers and toilets and Russel Tovey is prevailed on to sing the song he sang at miners' benefits gigs when he was a boy soprano. (Shades, now I come to think of it, of Billy Elliot.)
The film was so resolutely not going anywhere that I became seized by a dreadful premonition that the entire cast were going to be wiped out by Covid. This doesn't in fact happen. But we are still left with a film which meanders along wittily before coming to a point that seems to contradict the point it was trying to come to.
We can all agree that the National Health Service is a Good Thing. We can all agree that the caring professions do a terribly good job, particularly during the Covid crisis. We can all agree that getting old sucks. We can all agree that we are not as good at elder care as we should be, partly because Blairite apples go to college too far from the tree. (Russell Tovey tells the hopeless work experience boy that London is better than the North and advises him to get out as soon as he can.) I am not sure if we are allowed to say that Indian extended families are better at looking after Granny that white nuclear ones, even if we add "not all white people". There is something slightly patronising about Doctor Valentine telling us, in voice over, that he "loves the old" in general.
The film ends with him breaking the fourth wall and telling the audience (through a covid mask) about how wonderful and caring doctors are, how the NHS is the best thing England ever achieved, and how they care for us and comfort us even when they can't cure us. I don't know if we were supposed to stand outside the hospital and clap. I mean, yes, yes, and very yes, but "Doctors are kind" isn't actually a response to the issue that pre-conversion Russell Tovey raised about efficiency and centres of excellence and democracy meaning that the public know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. It didn't seem to follow on from either the film Alleluia appeared to be or the film it turned out to be.
Goodness gracious me. The last line of the film is "We are love and for love there is no charge." And everyone calls him Valentine.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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