The Ploughman's Lunch

That's my question! Rosemary Harris who has appeared on stage, films, and television with great respect, accolades and honors still hasn't received Damehood yet like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and yet she is as good and even sometimes better than her contemporary British counterparts. It's one of the reasons I picked up this little film at the drugstore for five dollars. Jonathan Pryce still hasn't been honored yet but I'm sure he will. I could Rosemary Harris in anything. I'm glad that people are recognizing her more since she played the Aunt in Superman but still it's not enough. Rosemary Harris plays Ann, a mature older woman, who has her sights set on Pryce's James Penfield, a troubled journalist. The film is set in the 1980s during the peak of Margaret Thatcher's term as the country's prime minister. I was pleased to see parts of London like Brixton, Brighton, and Norfolk actually be used as locations rather than just saying they were there. The plot is thin but I think Rosemary's BAFTA nominated performance makes up for it anyway. She's still heartbreaking and brilliant.

I am a huge fan of Richard Eyre's work on stage and think he did a masterful job running the National Theatre for all those years. However, both the movies he has directed that I have seen (this one and Iris) are flawed. I think his style of directing might not suit film. There are several passages of the film that neither progress argument, nor develop characters nor set atmosphere effectively.

I am also a big fan of Ian McEwan's writing. This story is full of interesting material. Some of it could come across better - especially the double crossing in the various love interests and the echo of the Suez crisis therein. This might come down to the screenplay or perhaps the directing again.

But stick with it.

The scene in the pub during which Frank Finlay explains to Jonathan Pryce the origins of the ploughman's lunch is superb. The ghastly hermetically sealed cheese chunks on their plates providing a visual to Finlay's words.

We live in a society where we constantly reinvent the past in our attempts to shape the future as we want it. This is a key lesson in the film on all its many levels - the several love interests, Pryce's dereliction of family duty, the Falklands War and the Suez Crisis.

This is a fascinating piece. All the characters are ghastly, especially Jonathan Pryce's well-crafted central character. The standard of acting is consistently high. Despite the flaws, it is well worth seeing.

Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining. I saw it on release and again for the second time this week and the lasting impression is a dog's dinner of ideas. At the centre there is a doomed romance, overlaid with a smorgasbord of messages inter-weaved in the script. I shall attempt to list these message here. a) The long term decline of Britain's importance in the world, b) the folly of the Suez expedition and a sort of oblique parallel with the Falklands War which doesn't work - Suez was a disaster, the Falklands campaign successful, c) the emotional toughness/nastiness of the Thatcher government, d) the Greenham Common anti-nuclear encampment (not sure what this is doing in the film), e) the lies sold by advertising, f) the bias inherent in the way we rewrite history, g) the English class system, h) the emotional coldness of journalists. Phew! Added on to this, we have the conundrum of our hard to like hero James Penfield who wants love, but does not show it to those who love him. Crucially, he is foolishly chasing a snooty, upper (ruling) class girl whose own frivolous behaviour seems to be a comment on Britain's decline. The real shame is that there are some fantastic parts to the film. Rosemary Harris is just perfect as the love seeking historian. And, then there is the cinema magic of filming the denouement to the central romance within the real-life setting of the Conservative Party Conference. With a few changes this film could have been up there with Performance and Brief Encounter, instead of an obscure curio of British cinema.

With rumblings coming from the wires about some Argentine activity on the remote island of South Georgia and Margaret Thatcher's first administration struggling to deal with the gloomy British economic outlook, jaded radio journalist "Penfield" (Jonathan Pryce) finds himself trying to stay motivated despite the fact that he hasn't a penny to his name. In search of at least a degree of self-fulfilment, he decides to write a book all about the Franco-British invasion on the Suez Canal in 1956. He has an interest in the geo-political dynamics and history of those turbulent events, and so sets about lining up some interviewees to put some flesh on the bones and it's whilst he is researching, he encounters the redoubtable "Ann" (Rosemary Harris) whose left wing political agenda chimes a little with his but more revealingly shows him up as a bit of an intellectual lightweight. Indeed, his lack of societal "evolution" is all too clearly demonstrated as he visits his poorly mother and his father, both traditional working class and proud parents, with whom he has but a tangential connection nowadays. To be honest, I found this all to be a little too pedestrian and introspective a tale of a man who probably started out as an idealist but who was complicit in letting the system grind him down into a supercilious cynic. Pryce delivers well enough but with so little by way of characterisation to work with it all rather drearily meanders along. Harris, on the other hand, has less to do but makes much more of her role as a women still tainted by life, but much more in control of what she thinks and what she wants. Of course there is some political commentary here, and a thinly veiled critique of all things Conservative and capitalist - either contemporary or during Suez when Eden was at the British helm, but that's also rather undercooked and disappointingly predictable. All in all it comes across as a television movie in terms of the production, the score and the photography and though watchable enough as a comment on Britain at the time, isn't really very memorable.

The Ploughman's Lunch is a very interesting movie. It is rather slow sometimes, and some of the lost interest ideas could have been a little better developed. But if you do stay with it, it is a fine movie. The movie is very well made, with stylish camera shots without being too fancy and fine location shooting. The direction is very skilled while never flashy, the story is compelling with a superbly staged and written scene in the pub between Jonathan Pryce and Frank Finlay and the writing is superb. The characters are even more fascinating, especially Pryce's. Ghastly but deliberately so. The acting especially from Pryce and Rosemary Harris is uniformly excellent. Overall, a fine and interesting film, that is worth sticking with even with the pace. 8/10 Bethany Cox