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Will Lily James and Michiel Huisman find true love in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? You have one guess. |
Director: Mike Newell
Cast: Lily James (Juliet Ashton), Michiel Huisman (Dawsey
Adams), Glen Powell (Mark Reynolds), Jessica Brown Findlay (Elizabeth McKenna),
Katherine Parkinson (Isola Pribby), Matthew Goode (Sidney Stark), Tom Courtenay
(Eben Ramsey), Penelope Wilton (Amelia Maugery)
Every so often I get challenged to write a really short
review. The Guernsey Literary and Potato
Peel Pie Society is the sort of film where I could almost write a review
that was shorter than the film’s title. Look at the poster – everything you are
now expecting from this movie, it completely delivers. It’s as warm,
unthreatening, comfortable and familiar as Sunday dinner at your Gran’s.
In 1948, novelist Juliet Ashton (Lily James – so winning you
overlook the fact that she’s clearly too young for the part) receives a chance
letter from Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), a farmer in Guernsey. Adams tells
her about the book club that sprang up between himself and other islanders
during Guernsey’s occupation by the Nazis, where reading books gave them a
chance to escape the horrors of the occupation. Leaving her slightly put-out
American fiancée (Mark Reynolds) in London (one guess as to what romantic
pairing we’ll end the film with, by the way) she heads to Guernsey to meet the
group and write an article about them – and finds herself swept up in a mystery
around missing member of the club Elizabeth McKenna (Jessica Brown Findley).
It’s a film that virtually writes itself, the sort of
predictable Sunday-afternoon, British film where the 1940s look impossibly
glamourous and everything turns out wonderfully happily in the end. You won’t
be challenged by anything in it, you can simply sit back and enjoy it. Everyone
involved in the film does clearly understand what they are making here though:
it’s light, fluffy and unchallenging but it’s professionally made and everyone
gives it their all.
Perhaps it’s a sign of how much the film is pitching for the
Downton Abbey audience that it has no
fewer than four actors from that show in key roles. Lily James is radiant and
charismatic as Juliet – sweetly earnest and also with a determination to
wrestle out a truth once she senses a story. It doesn’t take a genius to guess
that she is going to be won away from her dull Yankee pilot (Glen Powell in a
totally thankless role of blandness) by the earthy, romantic, caring and
intellectually stimulating charm of Game
of Thrones’ Dario Naaheris, Michiel Huisman (the sort of role an actor can
play standing on his head but he’s still very good).
Penelope Wilton does some good work as a widow clinging to
happier memories that she can’t bear to see affected by harsher truths. Jessica
Brown Findley has little to do, but to be honest it’s not a problem as the part
is such a straight re-tread of her Lady Sybil role from Downton she could probably do it in her sleep. The last Downton alumnus, Matthew Goode, is
rather funny as Juliet’s sweet but good-naturedly exasperated publisher. For
the rest of the cast, Katherine Parkinson oscillates between comic timidity and
soulful sensitivity and Tom Courtenay gives a playful old man performance which
can’t have stretched him.
Not being stretched is what the film is all about. Even the
mystery at the film’s centre isn’t particularly gripping or – even when the
truth is revealed – something that really has much impact on anything. And it’s
hardly the focus anyway. It’s really a film that wants you to enjoy the
photography and landscapes, and to root for the two leads to fall in love with
each other. It wants you to feel little else, and carefully avoids getting you
to invest your emotions in other aspects of the story so you can’t get upset.
It’s the sort of film that you could call “lovely”, that passes an hour or two
perfectly well, and at the end of it you’ll tell people it was fine. Then
you’ll never think about it again. Ever.
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