Wetherby

(1985)

Joely Richardson film clips. Samples below.

Suzanna Hamilton film clips. Samples below.

Scoop's notes on the film:

Wetherby is the name of a nondescript and middle class English town which provides the backdrop for a mysterious whydunit. (It's a suicide, so we already know WHOdunit.)

Vanessa Redgrave plays an unfulfilled middle aged schoolmarm who hosts a small dinner party one evening. As the guests arrive, a stranger appears at the door, says he is John Morgan, and walks in to the dinner. They set an extra place for him. Nobody really knows whether someone else extended a kind invitation to this lost soul, but it turns out that he has simply invited himself.

John Morgan returns to the teacher's house the next morning, makes a little small talk, pulls a gun from his pocket, sticks it in his mouth, and calmly shoots himself.

And there is our whydunit premise. Why was John Morgan at that party? Why did he commit suicide? Why did he choose the teacher's home to make his farewell statement? The last question is especially intriguing to the police, because a suicide among strangers is totally uncharacteristic. Typically a suicide happens alone, or as a dramatic statement made in front of someone for a purpose, but not among random people. The police inspector tries to assemble the pieces of the puzzle, with only limited success, but we in the audience get a significant amount of additional insight when we see incidents from John Morgan's past, from the teacher's past, and from additional moments during the evening of the dinner party.

The solution to the puzzle is never really explicit, but the script maintains an appropriate feeling of ubiquitous portent throughout the story by the unspoken parts of the secret. The story thus stands apart from the type of mystery which functions logically and deductively. It is inductive, and oblique. It offers not solutions, but hints, suggestions, or working hypotheses. This technique is quite an intelligent way to present the unraveling, as if Harold Pinter had decided to take his elegant dialogue and sense of foreboding away from psychological dramas about the rich and write instead a mystery story about the educated middle class. On the other hand, not everyone watches movies to see displays of intelligence, suggestion, and subtlety. If you want to see a true mystery story, you will really not care for this much at all. You will probably sit quietly during the closing credits and think, "Am I supposed to understand why it happened? I'm not sure that I do, even after all that exposition."

The dialogue is smart and it is delivered by a first-rate and classically trained cast, headed by Ian Holm, Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, as well as the aforementioned Vanessa Redgrave and Vanessa's look-alike daughter, Joely, who plays her mother's character in flashback scenes. The story had its origin on the London stage, not in a play written by Harold Pinter but one from David Hare, who adapted his own play into this screenplay and also directed the film, constructing it carefully to maintain a certain portentous tone. If you enjoy Pinter's plays, or other works which rely on the careful maintenance of tone to evoke a calculated emotional response from the audience, you'll find this to be a good example of the type. Roger Ebert felt it was worth four stars.

I myself don't especially enjoy watching Pinteresque plays. I don't know how much of Pinter's (or Hare's) dialogue is meant to represent realistic characterization and how much is stagy artifice, but I've always thought this sort of dialogue to be merely a component of the contrivance necessary to evoke a certain audience response. It always sounds like speechifying to me. Of course, I may be wrong about whether these characters are realistic. The fact that I don't know any people who talk or think like these people doesn't obviate the possibility that these portrayals do fairly represent a certain side of British life of which I am unaware. If that is so, I'm glad I don't have to spend any time there. I didn't even want to spend the very little time encompassed by this movie. I found Wetherby very tough going  - tedious, talky, and utterly devoid of warmth. Its putative subtlety could also be described as a lack of clarity and catharsis. Roger Ebert may be correct in his assessment that this is a superior film, but frankly the vast majority of you would top off a viewing by questioning how anyone could possibly like this. My own reaction to the film involved a great deal of admiration, but not one scintilla of enjoyment.