You could dine on nothing but lard for twenty years and still not develop the hardness of heart necessary to avoid being won over by Roger Michell‘s “The Duke,” a ridiculously charming British comedy that dunks a gamely accented prestige cast into an appealingly milky true story like so many digestives into a warm, well-earned, early evening cuppa. With the shaggy-dog tale of the 1961 theft of Goya’s portrait of The Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery reworked into a zippy screenplay by playwrights Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, all Michell really needed to do was find the perfect actor to embody the lead character’s daffy, unsinkable spirit. Step up, Jim Broadbent, who was so born to play Kempton Bunton, the indefatigable Geordie pensioner who confessed to the crime, that it sort of feels like maybe Kempton Bunton was born to be played by Jim Broadbent. And yes, his name really was Kempton Bunton, which is so much fun to say let’s all say it again: Kempton Bunton.
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It’s Newcastle in 1961 and art heists are the last thing on Bunton’s mind. Instead he’s kept busy with his cab driver job, his tireless campaign against paying the British TV license and his writing – he has a stack of hand-written plays in his wardrobe which he cheerfully believes, contrary to all available evidence, will someday get produced. And evading the sharp eyes and sharper tongue of his loving but wits-ended wife Dolly (Helen Mirren, lending her flinty talents generously to a crucial but supporting role) is a full-time job all of its own, especially when it transpires that Bunton no longer has one of those. In a nice little scene that shows off Michell’s keen eye for character detail even in tiny roles, Bunton’s boss at the cab firm fires him. “We’ve had complaints. One: you talk too much and two: it’s utter bollocks. So you’re fired,” she tells him, blinking through her prim cat-eye glasses before rather unprimly adding “Now fuck off.” Off he does indeed fuck, apparently never particularly troubled by losing employment, except that it will run him afoul of Dolly, who really wishes he would give up all his nonsense, especially as it keeps getting him in the papers, which she hates.
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There is a family tragedy in the background too – the death of their firstborn child Marian at 18, over a decade prior, which Dolly will not talk about. It’s a refusal that drives a wedge between her and her husband, not to mention her two sons, ne’er do well Kenny (Jack Bandeira) and sweetnatured aspiring boat-builder Jackie (Fionn Whitehead). It also, the more cynical might suggest, sets up a handy arc of growth for Dolly and a way for she and Kempton to reconnect eventually, but then this is a film so fond of all its characters that it would be churlish to begrudge it the odd contrivance in getting them all where they need to be.
When Kempton is fired once more, this time from a job in a bakery for standing up for a Pakistani employee (Kempton’s anti-authoritarian, man-of-the-people philosophies are no less passionately held for being somewhat erratically self-taught), he makes a deal with Dolly. He gets to spend two days in London, pestering parliamentarians and journalists to get behind his “Free TV for the OAP” campaign, and trying to get his plays read by the BBC, and if nothing comes of it, he’ll give up both his crusading and his creative writing forever. The meetings with authority figures are going just about as well as you’d expect, when Kempton, eating a dejected sandwich, notices a newspaper article about the hugely expensive Goya, bought by the British taxpayer, that is now on view in the National Gallery. That night, the painting goes missing – a scene amusingly mounted by Michell as a bumbling affair involving ladders and tarps and a scramble through a bathroom window that sets a toilet flushing. “Rififi” it ain’t.
That’s not to say Michell’s filmmaking is as naive as his protagonist. In fact part of what makes “The Duke” such a pleasurable watch is the application of boldly sophisticated, film-literate techniques to what is otherwise an amiably small-scale tale designed for maximum uplift. The throwback opening titles; the delightful soundtrack incorporating jazz, classical, contemporary pop and the kind of sentimental music-hall ballads that Kempton and Dolly might have fallen in love to; the archive footage of ’60s England; and the general mood of chipper salt-of-the-earth British gumption, make it feel like the gloss of comedic caper classics like “Charade” or “How to Steal a Million” has been applied to an Ealing comedy. Here, it’s not Audrey Hepburn in Chanel on the Riviera but sensibly-shod pensioners walking cobblestone streets and families eating mashed potato dinners in the remarkably brown living rooms of working-class Newcastle.
There are some strange omissions – it’s slightly odd that no one mentions WWII, which, with its spirit of make-do-and-mend and all-pulling-together would have been perfectly on-brand for Kempton’s homespun humanism, and would presumably have been relatively fresh in the collective memory. But such quibbles are minor, and as the film gears up to its irresistibly heartwarming finale, and even the frostiest of barristers find themselves warming to Kempton’s schtick despite themselves, it’s very hard not to follow suit, and stand and cheer in the pubic gallery. It will sound like faint praise and it isn’t really meant to be, but “The Duke” is proudly old-fashioned, satisfying family entertainment: Bring your mum and your gran (or anyone’s gran if yours is not available) preferably to a matinee, and you’ll have a delightful time and be home, whistling cheerfully, in time for tea. Which, as Kempton reminds us sagely, is what you lot down south would call “Dinner.” [B/B+]
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