Roger Michell | The Duke / 2021

don quixote demolishes his windmill

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Bean and Clive Coleman (screenplay), Roger Michell (director) The Duke / 2021

           

The Duke is one of those British movies that, despite of its lack of significant content, is nearly impossible not to love.

     The story is an odd one, hardly believable, but nonetheless the truth. And according to Christopher Bunton, the grandson of the central figure upon whose exploits this film is based, the movie got it right and was extremely close to what happened in real life.

     But who might have believed such a tale, that in the early 1960s a Liverpool taxi driver— who spent most of his free time arguing against the license tax charged to watch the BBC on the telly and speaking out against the government and industry alike about their treatment of the working man, their racism, and general ineptitude—might end stealing the highly beloved British treasure of a painting by Francisco Goya of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London, keeping the painting in safe-hiding and statedly willing to return it if only his favorite charity, his personal organization dedicated to ceasing the license fee for elders, were to be paid the recovery award.

      Even more remarkedly, he finally delivered it back by hand, admitted that he had stolen it—although the actual robbery was accomplished by his younger son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead)—and stood at trial where, after he eloquently expressed his intents and purposes he was miraculously found to be not guilty by a jury, despite the judge’s reputation as being someone, so Kempton’s barrister reports, of believing everyone is guilty until proven innocent. He was fined only for the lost frame, left behind in a London hotel room by Jackie, and spent a mere 4 months in prison.

     For these strange acts of behavior, moreover, Kempton became famous, the license fee eventually (40 years later) was waived for individuals over the age 75, and the laws were rewritten regarding stealing objects from public display since Kempton’s lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson claimed that his client was simply “borrowing” the work rather than stealing it; the robbery was referenced even in the James Bond movie, Dr. No (1963). Certainly the painting lost much of its clout and for a short time, at least, the assumed values of upper crust British society were threatened—so much so that when Jackie, four years later, turned himself in for having actually made the heist, the Director of Public Prosecutions, fearing that Kempton might again become a cause celebre, agreed that if the son kept quiet about his guilt they would never prosecute.

       Such a fascinating story is certainly charming, and writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman created a remarkable series of comical monologues, most of them based on the actual court hearings, with which Kempton thoroughly entertains us. They also introduced a family back story about the Buntons’ loss of a daughter at the age of 16 in a bicycle accident. This also was based on facts, but since so little was known about Kempton’s wife Dorothy, their conviction that she had attempted to bury the facts and resisted natural grieving is generally fiction. Almost everything about the character of Dorothy in this film, her hard-working, non-nonsense resistance of her husband’s Don Quixotism and Kempton’s and Jaimie’s attempts to keep the painting out of her sight by embedding it an old bureau, represent a fair amount of creative thinking, which also may explain why her character seems so muted, despite the remarkable acting talents of Helen Mirren.

       The film itself, moreover, is well directed, the cinematography excellent, and the costumes entirely convincing, equal to the talents involved: Roger Michell, Mike Eley, and Dinah Collin. Michell, best known for his direction of Notting Hill (1999), died suddenly this past year at the age of 65, just after completing this movie, the causes of his death never revealed; Eley has been involved as director of photography or cinematographer for the documentary Marley (2012), the TV series Parade’s End (2012), and 64 other pictures; while Dinah Collin has dressed the actors for the TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice (1995), The Ghost Writer (2010), and Venus in Fur (2013) to name just a few of her achievements.

        But the real essence of this work of cinema belongs to actor Jim Broadbent as Kempton and, when they give her an opportunity, Helen Mirren, both of whom by this time have so honed their thespian skills that just hearing their voices is nothing short of a wonder. This will probably go down as Broadbent’s very best role, even though he has had so many great moments of the screen in roles large and very small. And Mirren, who came to the mysterious figure she portrays without any preconceptions, has endowed Dorothy with our sense of her being a deeply passionate woman who has never been given nor allowed herself the opportunity to express her pent-up loves and hates. Kempton was clearly such a force with whom she had to daily reckon in order just to survive, to eke out enough money to feed her truly eccentric brood who preferred dreaming and stealing to support instead of tamping down their imaginations and working within the boundaries that usually applied to the working class. She had simply to bear her hurts, lift up her head, and scrub down her employer’s toilets, while always fearful that her family’s activities might mean the loss of her job.

      And I’ve said nothing yet about Kempton’s most passionate dream, that he might himself write scripts for the telly he was so intent upon enjoying without paying for. From a story about a female Christ to a grief-stricken tale based on his own daughter’s death, Kempton Bunton poured out dozens of scripts which absolutely no one who read them considered worthy of even comment. No screenplay or teleplay of his was ever produced, yet his own words told a story in public court so brilliantly expressed that a whole nation looked up from their daily duties, grinned, smiled, and laughed with the conviction that finally someone was publicly speaking their truths!

      The Duke is the fairy tale you keep hearing about that came true.

 

Los Angeles, April 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).