Loving
The quirky feel of cult novelist Henry Green's prose makes it safely to the screen in "Loving," a downstairs-downstairs romantic fable set in an Irish country home during 1941. Toplined by finely judged playing from Mark Rylance and newcomer Georgina Cates as a head butler and ambitious maid, and peopled with enough offbeat characters to spawn a sitcom series, this BBC telepic should make the rounds of fests geared to quality British fare.
The quirky feel of cult novelist Henry Green’s prose makes it safely to the screen in “Loving,” a downstairs-downstairs romantic fable set in an Irish country home during 1941. Toplined by finely judged playing from Mark Rylance and newcomer Georgina Cates as a head butler and ambitious maid, and peopled with enough offbeat characters to spawn a sitcom series, this BBC telepic should make the rounds of fests geared to quality British fare.
The time is mid-1941, when London was suffering nightly air raids and the war in Europe seemed to be going the Germans’ way. In sleepy old neutral Ireland, however, life goes on, and nowhere more so than in spacious Kinalty Castle, where a bunch of Brits keep the traditional class structure going in between feeling mildly guilty about not returning home to join the war effort.
Following the death of the head butler, the middle-age Raunce (Rylance) assumes his position of power, which includes fiddling the household accounts, generally bossing the rest of the staff around and being unctuous to his widowed boss, the snooty Mrs. Tennant (Judy Parfitt), and her philandering daughter-in-law.
More important however, Raunce also comes into the sights of sexy young maid Edith (Cates), a free spirit who slowly thaws him out and makes him see broader horizons.
With only a sliver of real plot to go on (some shenanigans about Tennant’s stolen rings), screenwriter Maggie Wadey has done a heroic job adapting Green’s anti-novel to the screen. Pic basically boils down into a series of slowly accruing character studies, given an irreal quality by stylized, semiliterary dialogue that deliberately sounds out-of-kilter in the unlettered mouths of the servants.
It’s the performances that finally make the movie’s fragile parts cohere, with Rylance — a variable actor till now (“Angels and Insects”) — finally coming up aces in surprise casting. Skillfully treading a thin line between parody and underplaying, and handling Green-Wadey’s dialogue with consummate ease, Rylance creates a memorable character in which working-class pride in his job slowly is eroded by uncontrolled passion.
Cates, who made a memorable bow in “An Awfully Big Adventure,” is terrific as the sexually louche Edith, whether rolling around girlishly half-naked with fellow house maid Violet (Lucy Cohu, also good) or leading Raunce down darker paths. As the lady of the house, Parfitt is all aristo poise and cut-glass accent. The many other supports all are fine.
Longtime TV helmer Diarmuid Lawrence gives the whole thing a solid small-screen look, with Shaun Davey’s use of popular period tunes jollying along the action at regular intervals. Pic was shot on location over 24 days at two castles, Birr and Tullynally, in Ireland.
Loving
(BRITISH)
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