16 MARCH 1985, Page 39

Cinema

Modern times

Peter Ackroyd

Wetherby ('15', Curzon West End) Wetherby is certainly a very serious film; its worthiness shines through but, like a weak sun, it is apt to give one a headache. There was a time when audi- ences left the theatre trying to grasp the 'message' of the play they had just seen, and this film seems to fulfil a similar function; the fact that its writer and direc- tor, David Hare, is better known as a playwright is an additional reason why it might be more profitably seen in theatrical rather than cinematic terms.

Some middle-class personages are grouped around a dinner table; they are talking with a certain forced or drunken inconsequence (as they might do at the beginning of Act One), and the scene is directed in so cryptic a way that a distinct air of mystery envelops the proceedings. This is essentially the world of Fifties drama, and for a working model we need look no further than The Cocktail Party: in Wetherby, too, there is a Mysterious Stran- ger who will change everyone's life.

Vanessa Redgrave plays a school- teacher, with that ostensible honesty which is her trademark; it is to her table that the uninvited guest comes, and on the follow- ing morning he shoots himself in front of her (this is not a nice moment). The rest of the film is taken up with the consequences of this fatal act, as sudden death prompts the rest of the company into a series of lugubrious confessions — a rather labo- rious style that encompasses even the policeman who is conducting the investiga- tion of the suicide. We discover that the Mysterious Stranger was marked by a 'central disfiguring blankness', and was obscurely motivated by anger or sexuality; in his death we might also be meant to see an emblem for the general mood of im- poverishment and gloom which invades all of the other characters. Other meanings may be lurking here (one's suspicions are aroused by David Hare's professed inabil- ity to understand the real significance of the film), but a narrative which veers between a sad monotone and cryptic vio- lence may quite possibly have forfeited the 'larger significance which comes from a more comprehensive vision. It is a film of scenes — some of them intriguing, some of them attractive, many of them portentous.

It would not be pushing the theatrical analogy too far to describe the actors as actorish; to put it another way, the cast seems to exhibit that particular range of emotions which contemporary performers always seem to adopt and which will, in a generation or two, seem as remote and as unrealistic as the gestures of a Duse or a Bernhardt: the wintry smiles, the painful attempts at communication, the defeated gestures, the sad honesty may even be remembered alongside the histrionic cavortings of Mrs Patrick Campbell as yet another attempt to subdue reality by arti- fice. This is nothing against the actors themselves (although the combined good intentions of Judi Dench, Ian Holm and Vanessa Redgrave are sometimes too much to endure); it is simply that their styles are so alike that they become oppres- sive when seen together.

There are some good moments, how- ever: some of the incidental characters and scenes were entertaining, particularly in a series of 'flashbacks' when a young Red- grave and young Dench were almost better than the real thing. And Tim McInnerny was effective as the unfortunate suicide: the part had obvious possibilities, particu- larly because it is of a man who exhibits 'blankness', and I suspect that it could have played a much larger role in this film without undue damage to the structure of the narrative.

What Wetherby has to say about the state of contemporary Britain (which apparently is one of its aspects) is any- body's guess: the country, at least in its northern areas, is depicted as being at an extremely low ebb, both gloomy and in- consequential, and with a tendency to sporadic violence which only confirms the forebodings of everyone concerned; most of these characters are invaded by hopelessness, or at least lack of ambition, and they suffer from a certain weary impoverishment of feeling. David Hare has suggested that he is concerned with the atmosphere of Mrs Thatcher's Britain (if such a thing can really be said to exist), but when such large concerns are imposed upon a film they seem unconvincing — it is difficult, in any case, to know what this perspective entails, since an imaginative grasp of political reality would surely have to rely upon something more substantial than melodramatic violence and an equally melodramatic gloom.