The Laureate

The full story of Robert Graves is almost unbelievable and worth a film being made about it. This is not it. Maybe a TV series might have been the answer as they seem to have tried to get a quart into a pint pot.

Agron is not mad enough to play Riding and Haddock playing Nicholson comes off as being g sappy instead of the feisty feminist she was.

As a result none of the drama comes off as being credible a d we are left with an interesting story, but that's all.

This was nothing but disgraceful waste of time and poison for my mind and heart. Immorality is honesty; that was the moral of this nonsense. A shameful blow to everything good, noble and clean.

I don't understand the low average rating for this movie, or the high ratings for many "best-selling" movies.

Among many other virtues of this film, I would point out that it is at least a study of people being truly loving and bravely honest and generous with each other and themselves, in their intermingling relationships, much unlike the cowardly selfishness and jealousy of many usual, conventional relationships.

Struggling writer Robert Graves (Tom Hughes), his wife Nancy (Laura Haddock) and daughter Catherine (Indica Watson) move to a remote Oxfordshire home where they hope he can find some inspiration (and money!). It's whilst there that they read a poem from American author Laura Riding (Dianna Agron) and decide that they ought invite her over to stay for a while. Over she comes and what now ensues is an illustration of their much publicised menage-à-trois that also draws in the somewhat hapless Geoffrey Phibbs (Fra Fee) before heading for a denouement that is going to shake things up considerably! This film looks good, but none of the performances catch fire. Hughes is adequate and actually rather looks the part but neither Haddock nor Agron really raise their game enough to imbue this with any of the passion that this story must have generated at the time. It has a sterility to it which makes it rather self-indulgent at times, and I felt the whole thing a really rather lacklustre and wordy interpretation of the lives of three people that shook society, morals and the literary world. It will look fine on the television, so I wouldn't bother going to a cinema to watch it.

I enjoyed the film much more than some of the reviews here because I think it was made for a general audience who would not know who Robert Graves was. It took the breakup of his marriage to emerge from PTSD and becomes a poet devoted to Laura Riding. The sets were amazing and I thought the performances were very good. As a person who has actually read many biographies on Robert Graves, attended the Graves society meetings, and have met his sons (by his 2nd wife) I can say all those events did indeed happen. I suspect Nunez actually watered down some events to make the characters more likeable. That must be the reason there is one child instead of four and Nancy is a bit softer.

Laura by all accounts was off her rocker and a completely polarizing person. I think the film actually waters this down for general audience effect. The most important theme I found interesting (which surprised me by all the accounts on the web and reviews) was that Robert was bisexual. That was not the case. Robert was raised by a puritanical mother and apart from her family was never in the company of women from the time he was five until after the war. He did have a schoolboy crush on a boy which was not physical and thought himself gay . During the War, he was friends with Sassoon, Owen etc. In fact, he fell in love with the nurse tending to him after his wounds and shortly afterwards with Nancy who he quickly married. So in his later years, he called himself a pseudo homosexual which is not a hybrid but rather as "not genuine or a sham" The fact that he married a woman caused a strain with Sassoon who believed Graves was homosexual. There was no record of bisexuality ever in Graves life so it is interesting this reworking of his history as he affairs with his female "Muses" throughout the rest of life is well known.

Back to the film, I think I knew what they were trying to do which was more about the breakup of a family in order to save oneself creatively more than just a telling of a great writer. There could have been more nuanced in the acting especially in the character of Nancy as a feminist who acts braves and makes this pact but slowly cracks as Riding takes over Graves' life and her own. At the end of the film, Graves sets out to write the opening lines of his seminal work Goodbye to All That and make the decision to leave England to pursue a life with Riding.

Overall a good introduction to the life of Graves but please read the biographies to get the full story!,