Producer: Rupert Majendie Director: James Griffiths Screenplay: Tom Basden and Tim Key Cast: Tom Basden, Tim Key, Carey Mulligan, Sian Clifford, Akemnji Ndifordyen, Steve Marsh and Luka Downie Distributor: Focus Features
Grade: B
Most expansions of short films stumble; this one doesn’t. It’s based on a genial twenty-five minute two-hander, “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island” (2007), written by its stars Tom Basden and Tim Key. (You can find it on YouTube.) Basden and Key have added some new characters and songs to the mix and filled out details, but remain the leads, and director James Griffiths returns as well. The result, “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” is as charming and quirky as the short was, if a bit overextended.
The basic setup is the same. Charles (Key), a goofy, pun-loving chatterbox who got rich playing the lottery, hires songwriter-singer Herb McGwyer (Basden) to come to his mansion on an isolated island for a private recital. It turns out that the performance will be for an audience of one.
In the short film, that was it: the astonished Herb eventually sang his songs on the beach, accepted his huge fee and left, having developed a curious bond with lonely Charles. Here, McGwyer is a guy whose star has faded ever since breaking up with his partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) nearly a decade earlier. (The duo split when he decided to do a solo record.) He’s accepted Charles’ offer of half a million pounds for the gig because he needs the dough for a new album.
What he doesn’t know is that Charles has also invited Nell, hoping to get the one-famous duo together again for the recital-on-the-beach. And when she shows up, she brings along her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). The reunion is initially uncomfortable, but gradually the singers come to forgive what they perceive as long-ago slights and start playing again. All seems to be going nicely until Herb makes the mistake of presuming too much.
The character of Charles is also considerably fleshed out. He’s a widower whose late wife Marie was, as shown in one newspaper clipping, was a “superfan” of McGwyer Mortimer; they traveled together to see them live over and over. Using his wealth to recreate those experiences will be a tribute to Marie and a means of recapturing, in some small measure, the bliss he enjoyed with her.
Charles is also given a potential new romantic partner in Amanda (Sian Clifford), the proprietor of the little convenience store on the island. He clearly has a nice rapport with her, but it will take intervention from Herb to arrange an invitation for her to join Charles at the solo recital he ultimately gives on the empty beach.
Basden and Key have clearly refined their characters over the years, and they now play them like a comfortable old vaudeville team, and Griffiths gives them free rein. While Basden has the less showy role, the straight man as it were, he captures the hangdog reality of Herb’s current situation, and has some hilarious moments, as when he runs out of change for the payphone in the booth outside Amanda’s shop, or slips on a tray of food Charles has left outside his room. (The songs he’s written aren’t bad, either, though we hear them mostly in snippets.) Key, though, is the sparkplug of the piece, and his habit of saying and doing whatever springs into his head, however unsuited to the moment at hand, gives him ample opportunity to play the amiable buffoon, at once irritating but lovable. Mulligan is nice, and adds a pleasant voice singing harmony in some duets, but her essential normalcy makes Nell a more dramatic than comedic force. Ndifornyen proves a strong presence in a sharp moment with Herb toward the close, but the decision to send him offstage for much of the story on a bird-watching tour, while allowing for the McGwyer-Mortimer bond to warm up, is a weak contrivance.
On the other hand Clifford is a delight, evoking smiles whenever she appears; a bit about Nell’s trying to buy some peanut butter cups at her store is totally extraneous but delicious. (One wishes some room had been found for scenes including her son Marcus, played by Luke Downie, who appears briefly in that scene.) She even pulls off the late sequence at the beach concert, when the repeated shots of Charles’ sad face as he recalls Marie during Herb’s songs can feel mawkish.
One can, in fact, get the feeling that Basden and Key struggled to expand their script to full feature length. Some of the conversations are repetitious, even when the dialogue is engaging, and some sequences, like a tennis match (or even that peanut cup moment) don’t seem to add much, however enjoyable they might be in isolation. Oddly, given that expansiveness elsewhere, as staged by Griffiths and edited by Quin Williams, the ending comes across as a mite rushed.
And yet there’s so much low-key, rather twee charm here that it’s churlish to quibble overmuch; the rapport that Basden and Key create might be thought of as a much gentler, more quintessentially British version of the bond that Steve Martin and John Candy forged in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” And while the film is obviously a fairly low-budget affair, cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson captures the striking beauty of the craggy cliffs of coastal Wales, standing in for Wallis Island, especially in the beach scenes, while production designer Alexandra Toomey and costumer Gabriela Yiaxis don’t prettify the place. Adem Ilhan’s evocative score complements the visuals—and the movie’s mood—nicely, and works in tandem with the songs.
This isn’t a frantic world-beater of a comedy; it works more in the style of Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero” as a genial, understated, warmhearted fish-out-of-water story (although in this case the outsider spends a good deal of time in the water, be it the sea or the rain). And it brings to the attention of American audiences two talented British comics who, though they’ve been working together as members of the quartet called Cowards since 2004, may still be new to them.