London film festival: Nighy stars as a boozy literary has-been and Staunton his estranged wife in Pablo Trapero’s unconvincing adaptation of David Gilbert’s 2013 novel
N
o movie with Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy can be entirely without interest – and they’re heading up a mighty cast here under the direction of the great Argentinian film-maker Pablo Trapero, making his English-language debut. He has co-written the screenplay with another A-lister: Canadian actor and director Sarah Polley.
And yet the resulting picture, adapted from the 2013 novel by David Gilbert, feels nebulous and laborious. It is dependent on a giant twist-reveal, which is bafflingly implausible and strangely uncompelling even if taken at face value, and which tends to undermine the emotional reality of the whole film and its big confrontation scenes – though there is one riveting showdown between Staunton and Nighy, two black-belts each at the top of their game.
Nighy is Andrew Dyer, a cantankerous old literary lion revered throughout the world for the brilliant novels of his youth, who has published nothing for years and is now marooned like a bearded, drunken hermit in his huge Oxfordshire mansion, boozing, playing jazz LPs too loud and shouting at the walls. He lives with his longsuffering Czech housekeeper Gerde (Anna Geislerová) and high-schooler Andy (Noah Jupe), the product of an affair that destroyed his marriage to Isabel (Imelda Staunton).
