The Bookshop ** (2017, Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson) – Movie Review

The Bookshop (2017) tells an interesting, if minor, small-scale nostalgia story, with mixed results. On the plus side, the three main performances of Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Honor Kneafsey are all very good, credible, involving and unconvincing, and writer-director Isabel Coixet ensures that both the repressive Fifties period atmosphere and the film’s theme of the love of books come through beautifully. It feels like a labour of love from Coixet, and that is great.

But there is a pacing problem. The film runs way too slowly and sedately, some of the other performances (Patricia Clarkson, James Lance) are misjudged and unconvincing, and there is a tone problem too, as the English setting feels all wrong. After the long build-up, which requires considerable patience, the climax is melodramatic and unconvincing too. The film’s toast to courage when everything else may be lost seems well meaning but simplistic. Incidentally, you open any shop, then or now, and you’re faced with a whole lot of troubles. Yes, courage is needed, and skill and intelligence too, but a lot of good fortune, and blind luck.

Patricia Clarkson plays 1959 small town English bigwig Violet Gamart in The Bookshop.

Based on a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000), it is the story of middle-aged, free-spirited widow Florence Green (Mortimer), who decides to open a bookshop in a picturesque, conservative small town in 1959 England, provoking polite but ruthless opposition, led by local bigwig Violet Gamart (Clarkson), but also from the town’s repressive shopkeepers. Sadly, it is really hard for Clarkson to play English and the film’s main, really unpleasant villain (she underplays and over-enunciates, which doesn’t work here), and this proves an undermining weakness, eroding the film, along with Lance’s extravagantly hammy performance as local spiv Milo North.

The book part of the plot centres on Nabokov’s Lolita (should she stock it at all?; how many copies should she risk buying?) Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (she sends it to the sombre but kindly Mr Brundish), who develops a taste both for Ray Bradbury’s fiction and the heroine. He ends up as her one ally. Bill Nighy plays Mr Brundish gravely, but well, and there are hints and echoes of The Remains of the Day in the relationship. The intimidating, tall, thin Nighy looks quite scary, and his victory over the fluttery Violet Gamart (Clarkson) would seem certain. Nighy is great in serious roles, but a chance to play some of the comedy he’s so brilliant at would be even better.

Honor Kneafsey plays the equally sombre little girl Christine who volunteers to help Florence Green in her shop, who becomes a key mover in the plot. It is quite a grown-up, haunting little performance.

Why are movie promoting the virtues of books and reading? It is just guilt, I expect, and crocodile tears ate the demise of books and bookshops. Of course Book Club (2018) turned out not to be about books at all, just a silly old folks’ romcom prompted by one salacious work – Shades of Gray. Here we have another salacious work – Lolita – but, to reiterate, the film’s theme of the love of books come through beautifully. And that seems the film’s main winning card. Where did they get all these pristine copies of Fifties first editions and brand new looking Penguin paperbacks? The props departments must have been in heaven.

There is a reason the film doesn’t capture 1959 England too well. It is filmed in Barcelona, Belfast and Portaferry, County Down, Northern Ireland.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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