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THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND

Producer: Rupert Majendie   Director: James Griffiths   Screenplay: Tom Basden and Tim Key   Cast: Tom Basden, Tim Key, Carey Mulligan, Sian Clifford, Akemnji Ndifordyen, Steve Marsh and Luka Downie   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: B

Most expansions of short films stumble; this one doesn’t.  It’s based on a genial twenty-five minute two-hander, “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island” (2007), written by its stars Tom Basden and Tim Key.  (You can find it on YouTube.)  Basden and Key have added some new characters and songs to the mix and filled out details, but remain the leads, and director James Griffiths returns as well.  The result, “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” is as charming and quirky as the short was, if a bit overextended.

The basic setup is the same.  Charles (Key), a goofy, pun-loving chatterbox who got rich playing the lottery, hires songwriter-singer Herb McGwyer (Basden) to come to his mansion on an isolated island for a private recital.  It turns out that the performance will be for an audience of one.

In the short film, that was it: the astonished Herb eventually sang his songs on the beach, accepted his huge fee and left, having developed a curious bond with lonely Charles.  Here, McGwyer is a guy whose star has faded ever since breaking up with his partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) nearly a decade earlier.  (The duo split when he decided to do a solo record.)  He’s accepted Charles’ offer of half a million pounds for the gig because he needs the dough for a new album.

What he doesn’t know is that Charles has also invited Nell, hoping to get the one-famous duo together again for the recital-on-the-beach.  And when she shows up, she brings along her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen).  The reunion is initially uncomfortable, but gradually the singers come to forgive what they perceive as long-ago slights and start playing again.  All seems to be going nicely until Herb makes the mistake of presuming too much.

The character of Charles is also considerably fleshed out.  He’s a widower whose late wife Marie was, as shown in one newspaper clipping, was a “superfan” of McGwyer Mortimer; they traveled together to see them live over and over.  Using his wealth to recreate those experiences will be a tribute to Marie and a means of recapturing, in some small measure, the bliss he enjoyed with her.

Charles is also given a potential new romantic partner in Amanda (Sian Clifford), the proprietor of the little convenience store on the island.  He clearly has a nice rapport with her, but it will take intervention from Herb to arrange an invitation for her to join Charles at the solo recital he ultimately gives on the empty beach.

Basden and Key have clearly refined their characters over the years, and they now play them like a comfortable old vaudeville team, and Griffiths gives them free rein.  While Basden has the less showy role, the straight man as it were, he captures the hangdog reality of Herb’s current situation, and has some hilarious moments, as when he runs out of change for the payphone in the booth outside Amanda’s shop, or slips on a tray of food Charles has left outside his room.  (The songs he’s written aren’t bad, either, though we hear them mostly in snippets.)  Key, though, is the sparkplug of the piece, and his habit of saying and doing whatever springs into his head, however unsuited to the moment at hand, gives him ample opportunity to play the amiable buffoon, at once irritating but lovable.  Mulligan is nice, and adds a pleasant voice singing harmony in some duets, but her essential normalcy makes Nell a more dramatic than comedic force. Ndifornyen proves a strong presence in a sharp moment with Herb toward the close, but the decision to send him offstage for much of the story on a bird-watching tour, while allowing for the McGwyer-Mortimer bond to warm up, is a weak contrivance.

On the other hand Clifford is a delight, evoking smiles whenever she appears; a bit about Nell’s trying to buy some peanut butter cups at her store is totally extraneous but delicious.  (One wishes some room had been found for scenes including her son Marcus, played by Luke Downie, who appears briefly in that scene.)   She even pulls off the late sequence at the beach concert, when the repeated shots of Charles’ sad face as he recalls Marie during Herb’s songs can feel mawkish.

One can, in fact, get the feeling that Basden and Key struggled to expand their script to full feature length.  Some of the conversations are repetitious, even when the dialogue is engaging, and some sequences, like a tennis match (or even that peanut cup moment) don’t seem to add much, however enjoyable they might be in isolation.  Oddly, given that expansiveness elsewhere, as staged by Griffiths and edited by Quin Williams, the ending comes across as a mite rushed.

And yet there’s so much low-key, rather twee charm here that it’s churlish to quibble overmuch; the rapport that Basden and Key create might be thought of as a much gentler, more quintessentially British version of the bond that Steve Martin and John Candy forged in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”  And while the film is obviously a fairly low-budget affair, cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson captures the striking beauty of  the craggy cliffs of coastal Wales, standing in for Wallis Island, especially in the beach scenes, while production designer Alexandra Toomey and costumer Gabriela Yiaxis don’t prettify the place.  Adem Ilhan’s evocative score complements the visuals—and the movie’s mood—nicely, and works in tandem with the songs.

This isn’t a frantic world-beater of a comedy; it works more in the style of Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero” as a genial, understated, warmhearted fish-out-of-water story (although in this case the outsider spends a good deal of time in the water, be it the sea or the rain).  And it brings to the attention of American audiences two talented British comics who, though they’ve been working together as members of the quartet called Cowards since 2004, may still be new to them.

Now Showing

DEATH OF A UNICORN

Producers: Drew Houpt, Lucas Joaquin, Alex Scharfman, Lara Knudsen, Tyler Campellone, Tim Headington and Theresa Steele Page  Director: Alex Scharfman   Screenplay: Alex Scharfman   Cast: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Carrigan, Sunita Mani, Jessica Hynes and Stephen Park   Distributor: A24

Grade: C

It’s disheartening to see a promising premise squandered.  That’s unfortunately what happens in “Death of a Unicorn,” the first writing-directing effort from long-time producer Alex Scharfman.  It begins with a father-daughter scene in which widowed dad Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) is driving with teen Ridley (Jenna Ortega) to the isolated estate of his employers, the hugely wealthy Leopold family; the lawyer is about to be named functional head of their pharmaceutical empire if he can secure their approval.  The estate’s located in a large wildlife preserve the Leopolds have endowed, and along the mountain road a distracted Elliot hits an animal that turns out to be a unicorn.  Though Ridley makes some sort of psychic connection with the injured beast, her father bludgeons it to death when it appears to be suffering, stuffs the carcass into the damaged SUV and goes on to his meeting.

One can imagine all sorts of imaginative ways the scenario could go on from there, but the one Scharfman has chosen turns the plot into a heavy-handed satire of greedy Big Pharma—at least in part.  Mostly though, it’s just a gory home-invasion movie, though one in which the murderous interlopers are unicorns, stabbing their victims not with knives but their horns or simply ripping them apart with their teeth.  These are hardly the sweet critters beloved of adoring little girls.

The Leopolds are caricatures, presumably inspired by the notorious Sackler clan.  Domineering patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) is suffering from terminal cancer.  His wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) spends most of her time on reputation-building philanthropy.  Son Shepard (Will Poulter) is a hedonistic doofus, always on the lookout for a profit if it doesn’t require much effort on his part.  Their security chief Shaw (Jessica Hynes) is a no-nonsense type, and their butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan) a long-suffering doormat.

Elliot intends to keep the dead beast secret from his hosts, but it comes back to life, only to be killed again by Shaw.  Then it appears that Elliot’s allergies and Ridley’s acne have been cured by their interaction with it.  Further tests prove the curative power of its sometimes glowing horn, and soon Odell is back on his feet, hale and hearty.  Recognizing a goldmine when they see it, the Leopolds call in the company’s chief researchers, Drs. Song (Steve Park) and Bhatia (Sunita Mani) to do a proper analysis; they determine that the horn does have remarkable medicinal power, but it’s a compound that can’t be synthesized.  Only the real thing will do; happily, it’s evident the unicorns can regenerate when killed.

Brushing aside the warnings of Ridley, an art history major whose study of medieval tapestries convinces her that unicorns are ferocious, the Leopolds decide to hunt down the unicorn family that’s begun to threaten the estate to retrieve their dead child.  The confrontation does not end well for the humans as the unicorns show the ferocity Ridley had predicted.  Things get pretty gruesome as the interlopers rampage through the estate, and the mayhem isn’t funny.

Indeed, the humor of the scenario is pretty thin overall.  Poulter gets easy laughs as the overprivileged son, but Leoni hasn’t much to work with.  Even the usually reliable Grant is reduced to stomping about and desperately shouting unfunny dialogue, while the ordinarily agreeable Rudd has trouble being sympathetic, given Elliot’s efforts to ingratiate himself with the powerful family at any cost; his concern for making life comfortable for his daughter, nicely played by Ortega, in the absence of her mother is intended to show him a good father, but it takes precedence over his actual treatment of her.  In fact, he’s such a jerk that one wonders whether what’s become a Hollywood crutch to save audiences from leaving depressed—the old resurrection trope, in this case—is deserved in the case.  In any event, Carrigan outshines him with a canny, deadpan turn as a servant called on to undertake every unpleasant task.

Nor does it help matters that the VFX is not terribly good.  The CGI unicorns look blurry and unreal, and though Amy Williams’ production design and Andrea Flesch’s costumes are more handsome than one expects in this sort of fare, especially as set off by Larry Fong’s glossy cinematography, the overall effect is less than impressive.  Ron Dulin’s editing is variable, with the action sequences often muddy, while the score by Dan Romer and Giosuè Greco tries to pump them up without much effect.  The closing shot will leave many stumped.

For an idea boasting so much promise, this horror satire proves neither pointed nor scary enough to merit more than a disappointed shrug..