Dir. Julian Fellowes, UK, 2005, 85 mins
Cast: Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett
Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes in his directorial debut has made a very grown up movie about how an accident and a lie reveal the fragility of an apparently stable marriage.
Wealthy lawyer James (Wilkinson) and his wife Anne (Watson) have a comfortable and economically privileged life style with a house in London and a beautiful country home, where they are part of local village life. The event which sets things in motion is when the husband of their cleaner Maggie (Linda Bassett) is badly injured by a hit and run driver. Anne confesses to her husband that she was in the car, when the accident happened, with their friend Bill (Everett), whom it later emerges is her lover. James dissuades her from going to the police, from which choice a whole tangle of lies develops, and with them revelations about the characters and their lives.
The couple's privileged life style is a touch off putting at first, making them somewhat ridiculous and comic in their self obsession and smugness. But as the skins of the onion peel off, and we go into the dynamics of their relationship, you start to warm to them and become involved in their moral dilemma. Wilkinson is excellent, playing a man who is initially something of a control freak and exacting taskmaster. But as his world starts to fall apart, when he learns about his wife's affair, he becomes very moving, as in a heartbreaking scene where he peers at the lovers from the street through a restaurant window. Watson makes Anne an interesting and sympathetic mixture of maturity and childlike vulnerability, while Everett as her breathtakingly snobbish, blue blooded lover is initially repellent and remote, though he later redeems himself. There's also a very moving cameo from John Neville as his father.
This is one of those films where it is the revelation of the characters rather than the events of the story, which holds our attention. Along the way Fellowes also neatly skewers the still surviving British class system. Friendly and sympathetic though James and Anne are to Maggie, you are very much aware of the social gap between them and their cleaner. And when a black police inspector comes to the house to question Anne, without thinking she asks him how he’s settling down in Berkshire, to which he replies, “I was born here”. Fellowes' main point however is that money and privilege can't protect you from a predicament which could hit any of us, as he gets you to ask yourself, how far will any of us go to protect those we love and what is valuable to us?
Carol Allen
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