An estranged folk duo reunite for a private gig on an eccentric millionaire’s Welsh island in a thoroughly charming almost-rom-com. Here’s our The Ballad Of Wallis Island review.
The Ballad Of Wallis Island is a film of returns.
Writer-performers Tom Basden and Tim Key (plus director James Griffiths) are returning to the short film which earned them a BAFTA nomination in 2008. Carey Mulligan is returning to the folk music scene 12 years after playing the testy half of semi-fictionalised duo Jim & Jean in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. And it’s a return to the comedy once considered the British film industry’s bread and butter – a sweet, occasionally awkward three-hander afraid of neither melancholy nor jokes about Harold Shipman.
Basden plays Herb McGwyer, a down-on-his-luck musician who arrives on a remote Welsh island for a private gig. Unbeknownst to him, Tim Key’s accidental millionaire, Charles, has also invited the Garfunkel to his Simon, Nell – the other half of the folk-rock duo which catapulted the pair to fame in the somewhat improbable music scene of the mid-2000s, and to who Herb hasn’t spoken for years. Cue awkwardness, bickering, and the rekindling of old flames(?).
The quirk of the project’s Focus Features distribution means Wallis Island is arriving in the UK two months after its limited Stateside release – five after its Sundance premiere. It’s hard to imagine what the US festival crowd will have made of the script’s references to Alton Towers and Calippos (Calippi?). But, based on its rapturous reception, it seems that old thing about specificity and universality has rung true.
It helps that the film shows off a sense of the UK psyche oozing with self-conscious charm. This is British in the same way Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill are British. Wallis Island is specific in the eccentricities of middle-aged British men to a pitch that almost borders on the saccharine. The presence of Nell’s irritatingly self-assured American husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen) only heightens our main players’ middle-class bumbling.
Most bumbling-iest of them all is Key’s Charles. Bedecked in knitted jumpers and fishermen’s waders, his ludicrous plot to bring his wife’s favourite duo back together reeks of posh dad eccentricity in a way worthy of Richard Curtis’ legacy (the writer-director hasn’t been short of praise for the film either, calling it “one of the greatest British films of all time”).
After years of acclaimed work on the stand-up circuit and UK radio, Alan Partridge’s ‘Sidekick Simon’ is hardly a revelation – but his perfectly judged reaction to his heroes’ first harmony together finds a deeply repressed man practically exploding with emotion he doesn’t know how to express. That Basden and Key are able to go toe-to-toe with the more dramatically experienced Mulligan for so much of the film’s runtime is a credit to all three.
But while individual characters might be straight Curtis, there’s a very different British sentiment running through the rest of the film. The overall plot might be feel-good, but these rom-com-ish schemes aren’t all tied up in neat little bows. Mulligan’s Nell is now resolutely a former musician – she spends her time making chutney to sell at the local market and, least narratively obvious of all the film’s pieces, she’s perfectly happy. There’s a realism here that make’s the story more optimistic than overly sweet, helped along by Charles’ home straight out of Withnail And I – a just-past-it ruin of old money full of broken taps and leaking roofs.
Combined with some beautifully performed folk originals from Basden and Mulligan alongside some predictably brilliant comic set pieces (Sian Clifford’s chronically under-stocked shopkeeper is a real highlight) The Ballad Of Wallis Island is a film that’s easy to love, and deserving of it, too. The kind of charming, mainstream hit the British film industry has been sorely lacking of late, it’s sadly the kind of movie which increasingly struggles to find an audience in the cinema. I hope, for all our sakes, that this one does.
The Ballad Of Wallis Island is in UK cinemas from 30th May.
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