Michael Grandage | My Policeman / 2022

history of a sexual life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Nyswaner (screenplay, based on the fiction by Bethan Roberts), Michael Grandage (director) My Policeman / 2022

 

Generally, when I see a movie I try to sit down within 24 hours and write about it while it is still very fresh in my mind. Sometimes more complex works make me mull the cinema matters over two days. But here it is 4 days out and I’ve still not written a word about Michael Grandage’s alternately damned or praised feature film My Policeman. Obviously, my true joy involved the pleasure of watching this film which was somewhat dampened by subsequent reservations, or perhaps reevaluations, particularly with regard to the difficulties presented by the film itself.    

     Part of the problem with this film, at least for US viewers, is that it focuses on the gay world of England in the 1950s, a territory where we’ve been perhaps too many times through the lens of E. M. Forster’s works from an earlier day such as Maurice—this work itself bringing Forster back into memory through Bethan Robert’s fiction about Forster’s own ménage à trois between Forster’s lover, the policeman Bob Buckingham and that man’s wife, May—the stage works by Terence Rattigan and their adaptation and influence in the gloomy films of Terence Davies, Basil Dearden’s 1961 drama Victim, and even more outrageous depictions of British gay life such as Stephen Frears’ 1987 Prick Up Your Ears on the fatal love between playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, who still carried around even in the 1960s the Rattigan baggage as well as having to face the Draconian British laws regarding gay sexuality which we constantly need to remind ourselves were not fully rescinded—despite the 1954 The Wolfenden Committee reports—until 1999-2010. Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 drama A Taste of Honey was, in large part, a response to the “insensitivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals," despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Sir Terence himself was a worried gay man.

      Related to this is the fact that it is enormously difficult for even the most empathetic US citizen to truly understand the blight of the 1950s and earlier times on gay lives in England. Yes, thousands of lives in the US were destroyed by arrestment, public shame, and parental hostility throughout that same period. One has only to remember incidents—by most forgotten I should imagine—of the moral panic of that period which caused in Iowa, for example, the enactment in 1954 of a  “sexual psychopath” law which demanded the involuntary commitment of anyone charged with possessing “criminal propensities toward the commission of sex offenses,” which, loosely interpreted, meant the arrestment and commitment of 20 gay men from the Sioux City area alone. In his recontextualized film Tearoom (filmed by police in 1962, released as a film in 2007), William E. Jones reminds us that men meeting up for sex in a public toilet in Mansfield, Ohio resulted in 38 arrests with mandatory one-year sentences in the state penitentiary. Thousands of other such incidents, still to be made fully public, give evidence to the horrors of the time.       

        But there was something different in the horrifyingly homophobic land of Oscar Wilde given the fact of its encouragement, one might argue even requirement, for young men to engage in homosexual behavior within their class-conscious boarding schools and other all-male educational institutions and then punishing them immediately after for that same sexual activity in their adult

lives. Heterosexuals who had long been buggered as children and teenagers were suddenly asked not only to abandon male desire but to hypocritically embrace the conventional religious and social hatred and fear of such behavior, while homosexually-oriented boys turned into adults who might be arrested, imprisoned, or—at least according to the law—sentenced to death. In the insular, prudish, still basically Victorian-influenced English class and social structure the outed homosexual was not only punished and shamed but virtually banned from proper employment or re-entry into social life.

     Moreover, the system encouraged an intense closeting that even more than in the US meant having to marry for the sake of propriety and protection while sneaking off whenever one had the opportunity for obtaining sexual satisfaction. It might be interesting to think of Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richards’ “Satisfaction” within that context. If nothing else, we might symbolically perceive the differences between young men in the 1950s looking about for models, which in Britain would mean someone like the aging performer/dramatist/composer Noel Coward, while at least in the US there was, among others, Allen Ginsburg and Frank O’Hara.

    That British version is the world, indeed, that serves as the backdrop to Michael Grandage’s film. As The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, who very much liked this film which many more have disparaged, begins his review:

 

“Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret. It is set on a gloomy English seafront and intercuts between the buttoned-up 1950s and the late 1990s. As an earnestly intended drama I can imagine it being performed on stage at a weekday matinee, the climactic speeches echoing wanly around the auditorium. But in its contrived way, it conjures a very English sort of shame.”    

   Numerous critics have echoed the viewpoints of critics such as Benjamin Lee (again of The Guardian) arguing that actor Harry Styles playing Tom is “all construct and no conviction, a performer as unsure of his ability as we are.”  And Ryan Lattanzio (IndieWire) felt that Styles’ performance was “a blank beyond inscrutable gazes and sappy breakdowns.” David Rooney (The Hollywood Reporter) argues the problem lies with screenwriter’s Ron Nyswaner’s script which “never digs deep into his characters’ psychology.” 

 

     But Patrick (David Dawson) describes “his policemen” in just that manner: a country-like rube who remains innocent in a world which he might have imagined no such beings left. Tom is the kind of person, many of whom I knew in the mid-1950s, who truly believed that in becoming a policeman he might be able to do good in the world. Like my own father, he is a naïve true-believer, not a deep thinker, who acts out of social convention despite his own unconventional sexual stirrings and his later involvement with the archetypically intelligent gay man of the day, Patrick, who helps to educate him on art, music, architecture, and the pleasures of life, including women.     And Styles performs this unpretentious role rather nicely representing Tom with what David Jenkins (Little White Lies) describes as a “simple clarity to his line delivery and body language that works well in the context of a man driven by primal desires.” 

     While Emma Corrin, playing Marion, Tom’s early girlfriend and later wife, is highly praised by most critics, she is in fact no less simplistic a character than Tom and certainly more close-minded despite her role as a school teacher, as well as being far more conventional at heart than even her husband, believing that when she discovers Tom’s sexual “tendencies”—as she puts it—that they can be cured, despite her fellow teacher friend’s insistence that Tom will never be able to alter his sexual proclivities, knowledge based on her own lesbian life. If Marion is more lively and more interesting, ultimately, than the pretty policeman, it is because she wrecks true evil upon her husband and his male lover Patrick, and the film is finally presented from her point of view.

      The tormented Patrick (David Dawson) has the most memorable role simply because his character has suffered far more than the two innocents, having lived through the murder of his own former lover by the hands of homophobic street thugs, and seen the “other” individuals who represent Tom’s chosen career rounding up and beating gay men who, like him in one instance of the film, step out of the hidden gay bars for sex in an alley. His knowledge, symbolized by the

frightening seascapes of William W. Turner, is what entices this film’s emblematic Adam and Eve into his Eden of cultural delights. That Dawson performs such a rich role well is almost to be expected. But such a man can also be self-destructive in his almost revengeful enticement of his policeman away from Marion to Venice so that he and Tom might enjoy themselves as natural beings before the inevitable, Tom’s attempt to return to total conventionality.  

       Despite his curious mind and his almost blessed ability to block out all the contradictions of body and mind in his personal life, like Graham Greene’s innocent Americans, Tom is the true villain of the piece precisely because of his unsophisticated imagination. In his lack of broader perspective, he cannot envision what his marrying a woman out of his conventional desires to have children and protect his job might mean to a woman in love. Even his own love of public law and order does not seem to register with his private ability to boldly lie—both to himself and to Marion, as well as later on to Patrick. We too can justify his actions by recognizing the tortured choices he is presented by the society into which he attempts to remain. Only outsiders such as Patrick can speak the truth; but even they, in their closeted existence, are forced to pretend.

     As a self-chosen representative of such repressive laws, Tom, ironically, could never but be a villain, despite his stumbles through what he attempts to make a very loving life.

     All it takes to topple such an illusionary vision is an anonymous letter written to the authorities about Patrick’s “perversions.”

    A trial follows, with Marion attempting to serve as an affirming witness to her their friend’s good character; but with the police evidence of Patrick’s having been at the Argyle when they arrested another gay man having sex in its back alley and, most importantly, her own husband’s friendship with him and their travels to Venice together—all spelled out in detail in Patrick’s self-incriminating personal diaries—all are brought to what the British pretended to be justice, ending in Patrick’s imprisonment where he is regularly beaten by inmates while the others losing their jobs.  

    The originality and the marvel of this film—but at the same time perhaps another barrier to its audience—is that, unlike most gay movies recounting such desperate times, Grandage’s My Policeman dares to look at gay love involving marriage, a common phenomenon throughout the world still today, from the viewpoint of the woman. Moreover, this work not only choses that painful vantage point but positions itself years after the joyful and tumultuous events of youth, in the dreary silences and bitterness’s of the characters’ old age, forcing us to engage with far less appealing beings performed by Linus Roache (Tom), Rupert Everett (Patrick), and Gina McKee (Marion).

    Not only must we face an entirely new cast in far less engaging circumstances, but from the film’s very first frames we are left in the hands of a not very attractive and certainly no longer sexually alluring trio of individuals who through age, disease, and anger have mostly grown speechless. The former art curator Patrick has a had a stroke, the former teacher now living with Tom in a rustic sea-side house instead of the more engaging city of Bristol, where she, against Tom’s disapproval, has pulled Patrick out of a nursing home to provide him more personal and loving care. She may see the act as her redemption, but Tom reads it as her further punishment of Patrick.

     What we first might have read as a gay romance in difficult times now presents itself as something closer to the territory of Samuel Beckett. Indeed, the movie pays homage to another liberating and experimental figure of British film and theater, Harold Pinter, who wrote the script for Joseph Losey’s intensely closeted tale of British class-structured sexual desire, The Servant. 

      Tom, still blind to the truth, if not any longer innocent, will not even look in on his former lover, let alone speak with him. But then he hardly now speaks to Marion either, preferring the company of their dog on long seaside walks. Because of his stroke Patrick also can no longer coherently speak, and Marion, despite her friendly attempts to chat with her new patient, barely communicates with him, spending her days now reading the private diaries which came along with Patrick in a box of his only remaining possessions. It is only through her nightly readings that the events of the past are brought up into the cinematic matter of the movie. 

      With such a grim, silent bunch it is no wonder that many viewers and critics did not feel it easy to enter this film. One might imagine that Grandage and even the producers at Amazon might have taken on this film almost as a dare.

      But it is through the quiet eloquence of McKee’s acting, actually, that this film develops its base. Not only are the events of the film played out in her imagination, but it is through her eyes that we make sense of the terrifying failure of her and Tom’s marriage in which they are now, along with the dying old friend, all trapped. Thanks to their youthful failures to comprehend the full ramifications of the bigoted society in which they lived, they have been tossed, like the figures on Turner’s ships, into something like living graves.

      But despite their bitterness and anger, there are traces of what once made them so beautiful: the moment Patrick manages to utter his first coherent words, “Where’s Tom?”; the fact that even witnessing two young bi-racial gay men in the nearby village openly express their love for one another brings tears to Tom’s eyes; and perhaps the growing realization—as Marion plows her way through the diaries that can provide with little but the deepest of suffering—that even at their age things still can and must be made different, as it should have been so very long ago.

      If the men in her life have cruelly lied to her as she has, mostly in ignorance, to herself, there is finally no reason to continue the charade. If Tom should never have attempted to conventionally marry, she should have had the foresight to break off their pretended romance. Even if they truly cared for one another, as apparently they did, they should have been wise enough to realize that their relationship could never bear fruit, no children, no marital rewards—that it would merely expel them from the gardens of their youth.

     Near the end of the film, finally Marion does speak up loudly, refusing to be quieted by Tom’s mumblings toward the status quo and Patrick’s grumbles over his undeserved punishments. She explains to Tom what he refuses to see, that their relationship has always been an empty one with regard to her, with quick and impulsive sexual couplings, without deep and abiding love. She has been sure, once Patrick was removed from the picture, that she might bring Tom closer to her, but without succeeding. Even if Tom will not recognize it, she now realizes that he has loved only Patrick all along. And no one has ever asked how she might go on living her life without his love, what she felt about the predicament in which they have discovered themselves.

       Finally, she freely admits her guilt as well: that she was the author of the anonymous letter, which she immediately regretted and attempted to make up for by her failed testimony and now her nursing of Patrick back to health. But, she rightfully argues, the lies must now come to an end. Time has come for a change, even as it comes far too late in their lives. She packs and leaves with no intention of returning.          

     Tom, despite his inability to see his own life clearly, has no choice now but to enter the room where Patrick sits bound in his wheelchair and put has hand to his shoulder, admitting what for very long he has repressed. Patrick putting his hand up to touch in forgiveness of what can never truly be forgiven.

       It has become a time in which so many of us no longer want to be retold our unpleasant histories, to be forced to look once more into the terrors of the past. Most of us, it appears, would not have wanted to read Patrick’s history of his sexual life as Marion has insisted upon doing.

      It is the failure of our times, accordingly, that we cannot recognize what may be store for us because we have no knowledge of what has previously occurred and can and will most certainly be repeated by others and our own selves if we do not demand a stop. I have recently noticed that every time I post a new film about AIDS, there are hardly any viewers who bother to even read my comments about the movie, let alone track my essay back to the film itself. Yet AIDS still exists, killing men and women daily.

     Surely, one of the reasons that some critics argued that there is nothing new in this film is because they have not thoroughly explored that past and do not comprehend just how important it is sometimes to stop in our tracks to look back. Unlike the myth, we do not become pillars of salt, but protect ourselves, instead, in looking towards the past from the assault of what we thought we left behind.

      With every day hinting at more and more restrictions regarding the sexual, racial, religious, gender, and cultural expressions of our beings which do not represent the self-proclaimed majorities’ values, My Policeman is certainly worth experiencing as yet another document of a time we thought we had put to rest, but may possibly reappear just around an unexpected corner of our future lives.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).