COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 40 min
STARRING: Tim Key, Tom Basden, Carey Mulligan
Fine dining: from left, Basden, Key and Mulligan
When sulky folk-rocker Herb McGwyer (comedian Basden) splashes onto the Welsh outpost of Wallis Island to play a cushy, £500,000 private gig, he’s summarily thrown off balance, toppling fully dressed into the drink from a dinky motorboat in a harbinger of the upheaval to come: Where Herb slam-dunks the un into ungracious, his garrulous host, Charles Heath (Key, who co-wrote the screenplay with Basden, based on their earlier short film), could hardly be more chatty — or more unwittingly invasive in his blithe disregard of boundaries.
Retired, two-times lottery-winning, millionaire widower Charles has far too much time on his hands to spout pun after pun while obsessing over the music that Herb and his one-time life and onstage partner, Nell Mortimer (Mulligan), made together as McGwyer Mortimer. Since Herb and Nell have been a done deal for a decade, Herb is expecting the Wallis Island concert to be a solo event. He’s also expecting an audience of more than one besotted fan. Not only is he dead wrong on both these not-unreasonable counts, but to his further consternation, when Nell arrives with her unanticipated husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen), she couldn’t be more cool about replaying their past.
Unlike Herb, who struggles as a solo artist while taking himself extremely seriously, Nell has moved on, living a proverbial quiet life that unfortunately doesn’t pay so well. And when she learns that Herb is collecting £200,000 more than she is for their one-time night, Basden and Key’s perfectly formed cringe comedy takes a left-field swing into the tricky subjectivity of the past.
Daffy and affecting can easily misfire as a mix but when they do come together, the marriage of opposites is magic. Director James Griffiths (who also helmed the original short) and his connected ensemble find a mellow groove that gives the lie to hard-edged logic. Defying probability to its rosy end, their casebook of odd-duck characters brings out the best in human beings.
