(courtesy IMP Awards)
What would you do if a letter arrived in the mail full of grossly insulting expletives that accuse in swearing-laden ribald terms that you are the very worst and lowest of people?
Well, for a start in the third decade of the digitally-savvy 21st century you’d likely wonder if the sender had lost your email address and marvel at the nostalgic assortment of paper, ink and stamp that is more akin to a timepiece these days than an actual, living means of communication, but once that shock wore off, would your first thought be who could hold such a low position of you to do this?
It most probably would be in an age where swearing is largely normalised and its sting has well and truly been blunted; but in still very conservative 1920s England, the missives are an outrageous scandal and they are given full gleefully affronted vent in the artfully clever and surprisingly affecting film, Wicked Little Letters.
In this small, very austerely detailed world, Godly people are still venerated as paragons of virtue and goodness, in the press no less, and neighbours cluck their tongues in horror at someone having the audacity and the sinfulness to – gasp! – be a single mother and be living with a man to whom you are not wed.
That’s the unenviable position in which garrulously ballsy Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) finds herself when, after her nascent friendship with still upper lip next door neighbouring spinster Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) goes south, she is accused of sending insulting, sweary letters to her repressed onetime friend that sound like someone furiously screaming into a very angry void.
The letters, to be honest, sound like someone who has never sworn and has no idea of usage or cadence giving it a long-delayed, and rather crudely expressed go, but even though Rose freely swears and gives of her opinion in ways honest and hilarious – Buckley is superb in the role, capturing her character’s avuncular freespiritedness and her emotional vulnerability in equal measure – she is accused of being the poison pen letters author.
Even after she’s arrested by misogynistically driven policemen in the form of Constable Papperwick (Hugh Skinner) who is as dim as he prejudiced against the women whose legal welfare is the province of the much put-upon Women’s Police Officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), Rose initially laughs it all off, declaring, and quite rightly too, that she has no need of swearing-filled letters when her Irish soul is free to simply say it loudly to peoples’ faces.
But Edith, who lives a spartan and cruelly circumscribed life at the hands of her darkly abusive father Edward (Timothy Spall), and who to be fair is not the loudest proponent of Rose as the guilty party, at least at the start – even at the police interview, Edith speaks fondly of her all-too-rare friendship with Rose who, you can clearly see, is the sort of person Edith would love to emulate if it wouldn’t bring down upon her a world of brutally executed fatherly pain – runs with the prevailing idea that her neighbour has nothing better to do than write crudely written nasty letters and which precipitates a courtroom drama that has the UK transfixed.
If you are not overly fond of legal battles royale, and not everyone is, then you may be groaning at the idea of a titanic back-and-forth between opposing counsel, but this is Wicked Little Letters which, thanks to an inspired, clever and emotionally insightful script from Jonny Sweet, goes absolutely to town and with ferociously funny wit on the great mystery of the moment – who really penned those letters and is it Rose for whom the case is pretty much circumstantial, built more on grimy bigotry and faux Christian virtue than actually evidence on the ground.
If you’re paying attention to the quiet moments the otherwise riotously comedic film gives its two key characters, you can likely figure out who the real culprit is fairly quickly, but that doesn’t lessen the amusing impact of Wicked Little Letters one little bit which happily and with mischievous intensity has a grand old comedic time skewering the way in which people are apt to believe anything if it fits neatly in with their appallingly ill-judged and morally bankrupt suppositions which are usually the result not of reasoned thought but simple, unthinking pack adherence.
The brilliance of Wicked Little Letters, quite apart from its richly detailed and fulsomely expressed characterisation – the supporting players aka women of the village who come out in support of Rose are a JOY – and its gift for an endless avalanche of hilariously clever lines delivered with gusto and fun, is that it takes the time to dig deep into the humanity of this surprisingly true story (see below).
Both Edith and Rose are given some truly moving moments in Wicked Little Letters, with the film under director Thea Sharrock who prioritises humanity every bit as much as the titillating whodunnit aspects of the story, and its these intensely honest glimpses into their character and domestic life that really add substance to the ribald wit of the rest of the movie.
The reason Wicked Little Letters works as well as it does is because it bolsters its very funny storyline with humanity to raw and wanting that you understand why each character does what they do and why seemingly out-there scenes are actually anchored in some all-too-real flawed human motivations.
Hence, while you are laughing and gasping in awe at how superbly clever the film is, you are also deeply moved by how each character is affected by the events of the film which do not play as you might expect and which leave each person battered and bruised to greater or lesser extents.
It’s funny sure, very, VERY funny, and the performances by all concerned but Buckley and Colman in particular are the stuff of legend, but Wicked Little Letters really hits home because we meet real, broken, vulnerable people enacting some fearsomely dark things in a futile attempt to paper over the holes in their souls and it’s them that we gravitate too in this unexpectedly moving that has you deservedly laughing outwardly but feeling so much inwardly that it stays with you long after you think it might.