Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, David Oyelowo, Adrien Brody, Ruth Wilson, Shirley Henderson
Intro:
Perhaps the strongest element in a sometimes fun, sometimes sketchy film, is its understanding of nostalgia and the comfort of entertainment.
The tag line for comedy thriller See How They Run is ‘The greatest murder ever staged.’ What makes it the greatest, we may ask, but the key word is ‘staged.’ The film leans on a hotchpotch of allusions to theatre and cinema, with Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, (a murder mystery that opened in 1952 and is still playing over 70 years later) as its device.
The writer is Mark Chappell of TV series including creating the Will Arnett starring Flaked about a recovering alcoholic. Director Tom George’s previous work includes British TV comedies Defending the Guilty and This Country.
See How They Run opens in 1953 in London’s West End, where The Mousetrap is staging its 100th performance. There is a telegram from the great writer herself. The film keeps her as an enigmatic but all-powerful character off screen for most of the story. The cameo by the always unforgettable Shirley Henderson, played in a slightly batty English style, is worth waiting for.
Henderson is one of an uneven ensemble, which also features well-known names including Ruth Wilson and Adrian Brody, who provides the voiceover and character of a seedy film director with a louche American drawl.
Harris Dickinson is fun as Richard Attenborough, the original Mousetrap stage star, playing him as a mannered prince of British acting royalty, all boyish charm and unassailable confidence. David Oyelowo is a classically trained stage actor who has won multiple film awards, notably as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. He’s terrifically smarmy as primping playwright Mervyn Cocker-Norris, one of the film’s chief suspects.
The above the line leads who play the cinema trope of the jaded veteran being saddled with an eager rookie are Sam Rockwell’s depressed alcoholic detective with token female Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) as a star struck fan, garrulous in her native Irish accent. Corny, yes, but Ronan delivers her performance with such engaging transparency we can’t help laughing at her every over-enthusiastic gaffe.
Rockwell is always watchable, and his war wounded British detective is gently understated here, with the drinking problem adding to a shambolic Colombo ‘gumshoe’ style performance that is funny and poignant.
The theme of Britain’s post war depression adds a delicate layer that deepens the context of The Mousetrap’s enduring popularity. Audiences will be pleased if seeking the comfort of a mystery, played out by stereotypical characters in that most British of locations, a country house.
See How They Run lets us have our cake and eats it too, by scorning the cliches in Brady’s voiceover, then indulging every one of them as the story progresses. We get to be in on the joke about the joke, right up to the country house setting and assembled suspects. There’s a modern deconstructive edge as the story presents a play in a play, with jokes about writing, theatre and cinema. There’s a touch of Bullets over Broadway, and even a storyboard pitch.
Perhaps the strongest element in a sometimes fun, sometimes sketchy film, is its understanding of nostalgia and the comfort of entertainment. 1950s London is beautifully evoked in a mise en scene of warm saturated colours for the mostly interior scenes of theatre, pub, hotel… Street scenes give us charming West End regency architecture, with cars like Rolls Royce and Mini Cooper, and the split screen device is a well placed homage to 1950s/‘60s film style.
The plot plays fast and loose with accuracy, like the actual small scale Ambassador Theatre being filmed in the much larger Old Vic, and various characters, like Attenborough, replicating real life while others are substituted. It also lays on the theatrical references with a trowel at times: the title is borrowed from a 1945 farce by Philip King, the script drops film and theatre names and quotes from Hitchcock, etc.
The audience for Agatha Christie mysteries shows no sign of abating, from Kenneth Branagh’s lavish Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, while TV adaptations are many and ongoing. Christie certainly hit on a formula. If See How They Run wants to trade on that formula in this light deconstruction, it has done its job with style and nostalgia, and by letting its actors loose to make the best of their often engaging, especially in the case of Rockwell and Ronan, characterisations.
