“It’s a whodunut that’s solved in the first… ninety seconds without a twist,” is how Wife just summarized it to me, hours after having seen this movie AT HER INSISTENCE. She says to emphasize here that Olivia Coleman is an “Oscar-winning” actress and Jessie Buckley has long been championed here, although more often than not she’s toyed with our hearts and expectations, so much so that critics have talked about the way in which A24’s Civil War next week will have to overcome the curse of her last film, Men, in order to right the wrongs put out by that movie. Anjana Vasan, best known to me for her fire performance in the best episode of last season’s Black Mirror, does a fair bit of eye rolling as the “woman police officer” of the force, fulfilling a very similar kind of comic role as Saorise Ronan in See How They Run (2022). Her subplot is actually probably the most satisfying of the entire movie, but without it, you’re left with a weirdly predictable friends to enemies “mystery” and a boring courtroom drama. Timothy Spall has by far the best monologue in the movie when he shouts down Coleman in a fit of anger, shifting from “Who is the Captain of this ship” to “You’ll always be my baby girl” in a masterful twist of emotional terrorism.
The premise of the movie is that someone has been sending really nasty letters to Olivia Coleman (Ms Swann) for weeks and there’s a foul-mouthed, rowdy young woman from Ireland who’s just moved in with her annoyingly cute daughter and her loving boyfriend (whose race is never commented upon–this last point is actually kind of fun. Wife says she really liked the race-blind casting for the period piece). It’s pretty clear from the shifty ass way that Coleman is acting that she is, in fact, the letter-writer, so what follows is approximately 90 minutes of “whatever the opposite of Justice porn is” (acc. to Wife), and indignation does not make a feature-length movie.
“I thought there was going to be a more complex motive for Ms Swann than ‘she’s just crazy’, but it never came,” says Wife, before reiterating a point she first made weeks ago when critiquing When Women Were Dragons, that period pieces make it difficult to comment on a contemporary set of issues when it comes to feminist satire, because “we all agree that women should go to school and be able to swear,” but that’s not what we’re fighting about right now. Immaculate makes the point that forced birth and those who blithely stand on the sidelines while women are turned into vessels for children is immoral, but when you set your characters and their ambitions in the past, you are forcing an argument on issues that have largely been resolved. We can call this The Green Book problem or the Hidden Figures paradox, a phenomenon in which the audience can convince itself that a social issue like racial equality has been solved because the problems of the period piece were resolved by an earlier generation’s political exertions.
Wife would suggest that there’s something even lazier going on in a movie like Poor Things, where a sexualized coming of age story is dressed up in the trappings of faux feminist irony in order to have its cake and eat it too (see, Sexy Yesterday), but honestly I don’t think that Wicked Little Letters has all that much to comment on women’s rights of any sort despite its casual misogyny and references to the suffragette movement of the First World War. The story is about the way in which sexual repression can lead to acting out in anonymous spaces, which feels like it’s a critique of toxic speech on the internet? And obviously no one thinks that a prison sentence for nasty letters is fair, so there’s something here about the First Amendment and maybe cancel culture? (Some British reader is going to bristle that I said that this English movie is about American freedom of speech.) But there’s hardly anything here for contemporary American feminists to grapple with, and partially, I suppose that has to do with the chasm between the social and class issues that American and British feminists have chosen to take up for themselves, the intersectionalist reproductive rights advocates on the one side of the Atlantic and the socialized healthcare suffragettes on the other.
Wife suggested a pretty good fix to the structure of storytelling: tell it linearly, make it into a friends to enemies sort of story. Maybe even include some of the devious and rude things that Swann has done to the other girls in her wist club! It doesn’t all have to be letter-related shenanigans! When we learn that there are actually multiple women who might have it out for her, that IS in fact a funny twist and they should’ve run with it a little more! Because there’s no mystery to be solved beyond catching Swann in the act and that’s easy enough to imagine doing. Aside from that, even the swearing is kind of underwhelming. “Going to see this movie was the third most optimistic thing I ever did,” Wife concluded, so that you don’t have to.
Honestly On The Sly 