HillstreetBunz

I watched this film because it stars Sally Hawkins. She is an incredible actress, and I imagine the attraction for her and perhaps for the other talented cast members is that the characters are so flawed and unusual (at least on film) that it is an interesting job to portray them. Certainly not many actresses could so convincingly and credibly sustain a portrayal of a person with schizophrenia so successfully.

I imagine that there is some potential for the audience to learn something about at least one person who suffers this kind of mental illness, and perhaps to empathise more readily with sufferers.

Maybe that's what attracted the directors/producers. I hope it does, even though the film ultimately trumps reality with a silly and patronising emotional comment about being sorry for people who are 'normal'.

As is the vogue these days, there is some dangerous oblique sideswiping at the medical profession, and a false suggestion that the protagonist is fine and would be better off without it (medicine) and the people who administer it/counsel her.

It is wholly character centric, never really admitting to the pain and challenges of having someone in your life and caring for them who suffers from this illness. No real recognition that Jane (her name) cant actually survive without this help. The illness is almost diminished to a suggestion that its merely our problem for not letting her be who she is, as it her 'neurodivergence' isn't an issue, rather our reaction to it is the problem. But hello! Schizophrenia isn't ADHD.

I won't recommend it, i wont watch it agin, and I would have avoided it had I known its tone...all the bleakness of some of Mike Leigh's movies, without enough of the real life absurdist humour that makes life (and such movies) bearable. It is just too grim ever to warrant more than a '6' because I don't know that anyone can actually 'enjoy' it.

Like all films of the period, some of the dialogue scenes seem slow (though perhaps this is closer to life than TV and movies are today!).

But whilst essentially a Hollywood 'B' movie, and despite a side character scene that would no doubt draw the ire of some people nowadays on the lookout for anything that may be construed as 'racist', it is quite a nippy little comedy.

With the sort of exceptional turn from EEH that allowed him to sustain a high profile career as a 'name' for decades, if never a romantic leading man.

He receives stalwart support from his English supporting cast (though as another reviewer commented, the talents of the great Alistair Sim are sadly wasted), and the production values are high enough to have appealed to US audiences of the time (who were happy to watch films supposedly set all over Europe before WW2- perhaps reflecting the nations first and second generation immigrant diaspora of the mate 19 and early 20c).

It employs the charm of various character actors besides EEH well, and the script, if not tight, is at least pacy and not too obvious!

I must say, my teeth were grinding even before I started to watch... reading that the Milford girls were 'independent minded rule breakers who threw off convention'. They weren't. They came from a background so privileged and entitled that the 'rules' others lived by were not even recognized by them. They didn't break rules knowingly, they were unaware of them.

The pre show blurb went on to speak of their lack of education, when in fact they were educated at home like so many women in history. A university education was never the only form of education. Their letters alone will tell any reader as much about what they did know as what they didn't.

The first episode, seemed to be the cliched cartoonish version of the English upper classes between the wars which holds sway with the chattering classes now.

But it did improve, its talented cast brought out some of the layers in their bilateral relationships, and the increasing clouds on the political horizons began to make their presence felt amidst the unfathomable stupidity of at least three of these under-employed but seemingly intelligent women.

What remains unpalatable (the commitment to fascism before, during and after the war of at least two of these daughters, and the similarly odd communist sympathies of another) is almost impossible to understand, other than to reflect on how divorced from the reality of most people they really were; by class, by design and by history.

Their characters are individually interesting when one reads their diaries, letters, work etc...but perhaps the story of these siblings cannot be told collectively without making it seem glib and crass, given its relationship to the sweep of history in the 20c.