R | 1h 40m | Comedy | April 5, 2024
History repeats itself.
Long before our current Internet vitriol-spewing-in-comment-sections epidemic—back before heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson said “Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it”—people used to write anonymous, poison-pen letters.
They’d curse out recipients, drag names through the dirt, and air other people’s dirty laundry. Back then, handwriting analysis and postmarks provided the only clues as to who the sender might be.
“Wicked Little Letters” is a delightfully blithe, foul-mouthed British tale; it’s a classic comedy of (bad) manners, where one boisterous, barefoot, earthy lass of an Irishwoman’s unabashed, shoot-from-the-hip, dead-honest behavior undoes an entire, proper English seaside town, laying bare the disingenuousness hiding behind the wan smiles of overt decorum and sanctimoniousness.
True Story
Based on an actual 1923 poison-pen scandal that turned filthy language into national news, detailed in Christopher Hilliard’s 2017 book “The Littlehampton Libels,” the film opens with a fun foreword: “This is more true than you’d think.”
Some exceedingly nasty-minded person has been mailing shocking, venomous, profanity-packed, unsigned missives to various residents of Littlehampton. The majority of them have piled up on the doorstep of 40-something spinster Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), who still lives with her mum and daddy in a quiet Sussex parish.
Her classic doormat mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) weeps, wails, and faints when she reads the letters’ contents; and Edith’s father Edward (Timothy Spall), embodying every quality our modern zeitgeist assigns to the current, ultimate, societal scapegoat—“The Patriarchy”—froths with rage. And the police take their sweet time doing anything about it.
Edith, on the other hand, maintains a visage of Madonna-like piety and long-suffering, church-going martyrdom, dispensing mild smiles of holiness for the morally-decrepit people of the terrible, godless, postwar society around her. Edith Swan secretly basks in the local outpouring of pity (and admiration for her spiritual fortitude) giving new meaning to the phrase, “swanning about.”
Off to Jail With You
When the Swans can take the barrage of epistolary invective no more, Edward calls local Constable Papperwick (Hugh Skinner). Clearly the meek Edith is victim of Rose’s verbal abuse, and the authorities have no choice but to arrest Rose and put her on trial for libel, based on nothing more than unsupported accusations, hunches, and a universal, local offended-ness, due to her lower-class status and big mouth. As Rose hilariously queries of the authorities, “Do I look like the anonymous type to you?”
Rose is clapped in handcuffs and forced to leave her daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir). Nancy, by the way, is of dubious parentage. That’s also a problem for the stuffy Swans.
Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss
The situation doesn’t sit well with the first female officer on the local police force, one Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), who also happens to be Indian. See above Haitian comment. She suspects Papperwick and their superior (Paul Chahidi) may have arrested the wrong woman.The men, of course, refuse to listen to Gladys’s theory, and so Gladys, after getting herself sacked for insubordination, starts her own private investigation, with the help of some local women (Eileen Atkins, Joanna Scanlan, Lolly Adefope) who support Rose, and dislike stuffy, self-important Edith immensely.
All in All
It’s not really a spoiler to note that hypocrisy is key to the crime; there’s no real mystery as to who the missive-scribbling vulgarian might be. From the outset, the film trumpets from the little British rooftops its categorizing of free-spiritedness-is-good, and false-pious-repression-is-bad. Also, the ever-so-slightly off, and eyebrow-raising quirky nature of the long strings of expletives, make them sound like they’ve been written by someone with no experience using them.
Much of the movie’s humor resides, of course, in staid, stuffy, stiff-upper-lip Brits reading long lists of ear-scorching, explicit-acts-describing profanity, while cringing with palpable physical pain. After the first few belly laughs, it looks like the whole movie will be a one-trick pony. But it’s a running gag with enough pause between occurrences that each instance of it still packs a comedy punch.
There’s also much fun to be had watching Ms. Buckley’s loquacious Rose verbally and Irish-ly smack down any effete Brit attempting to contain her boisterousness. Similarly, watching Ms. Colman reveal Edith’s secret delight in using such naughty, dirty words, and barely being able to contain the thrill she gets when asked to read them, is lots of fun.
Mr. Spall (often hilariously) shows us a domineering, possessive, prejudiced, hateful father who treats his 40-something daughter like a child, handing out reprimands at the drop of a hat, such as insisting Edith go to her room and hand-copy prescribed Biblical passages 200 times. Why isn’t Edith more sympathetic? We’re shown exactly where her sanctimonious, irritating, and mean-spirited behavior originates.
Ms. Vasan demonstrates here that she can handily occupy a lead role—expect to see more of her soon. Gladys’ subplot about standing up to her fatuous, ignorant male superiors is paralleled by the dynamic between Edith and her dad. And between these two struggles, as mentioned, the film obviously tut-tuts “The Patriarchy.”
The following is a textbook example of the meaning of “apropos”: Just yesterday, I received a notification saying that Facebook will start deleting all cursing. Half the people on social media would appear to endorse this creeping fascistic tactic. The other half are talking about how this repression will inevitably lead to an eruption. “Wicked Little Letters” portrays the eruption in hysterical fashion, but the real life parallels are anything but comedic.
