Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jessie Buckley, Olivia Colman, Anjana Vasan, Hugh Skinner, Timothy Spall, Joanna Scanlan
Intro:
… a charming, wry little romp. It may be wordy and repetitive at times, but it also boasts plenty of fast-talking fun and a wonderfully mean spirit.
The townspeople of Wicked Little Letters have an infectious passion for words, furiously spouting abuses like “foxy arse rabbit fucker” and “mouldy old tart.” Certainly, the film’s most redeeming feature is its love of words, its characters languishing in the delicious pleasure of stringing one cruel and colourful phrase after another.
Based on a true story from the 1920s, Thea Sharrock’s film follows the haughty but downtrodden Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and the foulmouthed, newly arrived Irish immigrant Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), who live next-door to one another in Littlehampton, England. The pair begin as pals, but their friendship sours when the Child Protection Services arrive at Rose’s house on an anonymous tip, and somebody begins sending Edith florally-written hate mail. Rose is immediately accused of the crime, but the town’s plucky young police officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) suspects that she isn’t to blame and assembles a band of women to uncover the real culprit.
Throughout the film, words are used to defame, accuse and gossip, maligning Rose’s liberated sexuality and belittling the town’s only female police officer. But they also have the capacity to heal and delight, to illuminate and emancipate, as when Gladys re-interviews Rose in a gesture of much needed kindness. The film similarly testifies to the power of writing as a form of therapy and the sense of freedom that can be found in merely bringing a pen to paper.
Recalling Armando Iannucci’s creative abuses in The Thick of It and Veep, screenwriter Jonny Sweet’s insults are consistently weird and inventive, chasing epithets like “salty old sot” with “piss country whore” and “mangy old tiddler.” The dialogue is enlivened by the great performers delivering the lines and Buckley and Colman are characteristically excellent in their respective roles. The pair share a marvellously abrasive comic rhythm, Rose’s quick japes ever matched by Edith’s ridiculous gasps and giggles. Indeed, surely no other actor but Colman could embody Edith’s rare mixture of arrogance, self-loathing and obliviousness while still rendering her an endearing character.
However, the script is overpacked in places as long dramatic speeches are relentlessly followed by one-line jokes, leaving little room for the words to sink in. The comedy relies almost entirely on the contrast between the characters’ primness and the vulgarity of their language, and this schtick becomes tiresome by the film’s end. Sweet’s script also raises many social and political issues, including media fame, domestic violence, the women’s suffrage movement and the Irish War of Independence, without exploring them in any depth. The socio-political threads of the film and the storyline itself thus come across as rather underdeveloped.
Even so, Sharrock’s film is a charming, wry little romp. It may be wordy and repetitive at times, but it also boasts plenty of fast-talking fun and a wonderfully mean spirit.
