Told on a broken timeline with dual storylines, “My Policeman,” starring Harry Styles, and now streaming on Prime Video, is the story of friendship, interwoven relationships and secrecy.
Based on the novel of the same name by Bethan Roberts, the film revolves around three characters, visited in 1998 Britain with flashbacks to 1957.
When we first meet Tom, Marion and Patrick, played in latter day by Linus Roache, Gina McKee and Rupert Everett, it is Tony Blair-era England. Former museum curator Patrick has suffered a severe stroke and retired teacher Marion is caring for him in his recovery even though her husband Tom wants nothing to do with their ailing guest. “He was always in your life,” Marion reminds Tom, “in our lives.”
Flash back in time 40 years. Tom and Marion, now played by Styles and Emma Corrin as a fresh-faced young police officer and school teacher, are falling in love. “He’s just perfect,” she says. “He’s Tom.”
In an effort to impress Marion, Tom introduces her to high-minded museum curator Patrick, now played by David Dawson. As their friendship blossoms, Marion suspects the connection between the two men is something more than platonic.
Sure enough, before you can say “throuple,” Tom and Patrick have formed a romantic bond and have become clandestine lovers. The true depth of their love, however, doesn’t become clear to Marion until she reads Patrick’s diary, as he convalesces in her home forty years later.
“My Policeman” is a beautiful looking but somewhat dull exercise in melancholy. Every frame is touched with a certain kind of wistfulness, which, over time, gives way to a sort of solemn melodrama. A fiery heat should ignite in this story of complicated emotions and prejudice, but here it is barely a glowing ember, scarcely enough to illuminate the film’s underlying themes.
In the performances, restraint is the name of the game. The English reserve on display is palpable, which befits a story set in a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, but it does hold much of the drama at arm’s length.
As young Patrick, Dawson introduces passion to the film, effectively portraying the character’s nuanced wit, fervor, pain and charm.
Of Marion’s portrayers, McKee takes the edge, giving the elderly woman a weathered view on life as a person with regrets who attempts to atone (NO SPOILERS HERE) for the actions of her younger self.
Styles, the over-the-title star, earns kudos for applying his talents to challenging roles like this and his work in “Don’t Worry Darling,” but stacked up against his co-stars here, the sense of longing and emotion necessary to form a believable character, is missing from his take on Tom.
“My Policeman” is an elegant, but dry, movie that should be a fierce hymn against prejudice and the erosion of personal freedoms but settles for melodramatic romantic tragedy.
Max Perkins (Colin Firth) was a literary editor when giants roamed the earth. He discovered and guided the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, writers who shaped the way Americans read and wrote. “Genius,” a new film from Tony Award-winning director Michael Grandage in his big screen debut, tells the turbulent tale of Perkins’s work with “God’s Lonely Man,” Thomas Wolfe.
When an office boy first drops the weighty, handwritten manuscript for what would become Wolfe’s first book on Perkins’s desk the editor asks a simple question, “Is it good?” “No, but it’s… unique,” comes the reply. It’s 1929, Fitzgerald’s best work is behind him and Perkins is looking for another genius. “The world needs poets.”
Transfixed by the sprawling semi-autobiographical novel he offers Wolfe (Jude Law) a $100 advance and helps the enthusiastic author cut 300 pages from the manuscript. The resulting book, “Look Homeward, Angel” is a sensation and Wolfe’s career is off to a running start.
“The only ideas worth writing about are the big ideas,” Wolfe says as he describes the ideas for his second book. “Big ideas,” says Perkins, “fewer words.” Despite Max’s push towards brevity, Wolfe delivers his next work, a 5000-page epic, in a series of overflowing crates. Another book—“Of Time and the River”—and another success reveals the author’s disregard for the people who helped him along the way, particularly Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman) a wealthy, married patron and lover who Wolfe “edits” out of his life.
“Genius” aims to be a multi-faceted look at a literary legend. It explores Wolfe’s hot and cold relationships with Bernstein, his father-son bond with Perkins, the dangers of believing your own press and the inner works of his undisciplined process—it’s like jazz, he says, let it flow, riff upon riff—but for all the ground it covers we don’t really get to know either of the main characters.
Law plays Wolfe as a charming feral cat, a man “hurt and shunned into poetry,” whose selfish ways alienated those closest and most important to him. Law is loud, boisterous—“ I know I seem like a circus freak,” he says, “that’s who I am. Too loud, too grandiose.”—but is stuck in a film that celebrates his rebellion but is too mannered to fully embrace it.
Firth is effectively restrained. His favourite song is the 1837 lullaby “Flow Gently Sweet Afton” and he humbly says, “My job, my only job is to put good books into the hands of readers.” His only quirk appears to be that he never takes off his fedora, even when he is wearing his pyjamas. It’s a nice, quiet performance but it contributes to the film’s reserved feel.
Adding some melodrama to the proceedings is Kidman, who is given the chance to chew the scenery in several emotional passages. “You’re overwriting the scene,” Perkins says to her after one outburst to which I say, “Always trust your editor.” Too bad Kidman didn’t.
More than anything “Genius” aspires to be a look at the creative process, the very lifeblood that flowed through Wolfe’s veins. We get glimpses of it. In one long montage the two men argue, toss pages in the air and trim Wolfe’s 5000 page manuscript into something manageable. More effective is a sequence in a jazz club. Wolfe pays the band to play a traditional version of “Flow Gently Sweet Afton.”
“That’s Henry James,” he says as the players plod along but as the band heats up, splintering off into melodic tangents, he grins and says, “That’s Thomas Wolfe.” The process by which artists go about their work is near impossible to effectively capture on film, but this scene comes close to explaining what it feels like when the creative juices are racing.
“Genius” isn’t a bad movie. It’s a love letter to the creative spirit and how language has power. Both over and under written, it simply feels a bit uninspired to be telling the story of one of the most dynamic and interesting writers of the twentieth century.
