Rufus Sewell – The Magnificent 60s

Except for the interviewee being an obliging idiot, this could as easily have turned into an own goal by a BBC desperately trumpeting its values to an indifferent nation that has been wooed away by the streamers. When the top dog is indulged by having her own top dog, a whippet, sitting at her feet everywhere she goes in BBC HQ and the supposed news bosses believe a scoop is snatching someone else’s scoop you’re on a very sticky wicket indeed.

And it’s worth bearing in mind that this show only came about because the person who set up the interview Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) had a severe case of schadenfreude and believing she hadn’t been sufficiently well rewarded wrote a book about the episode and nabs a writing credit here.

There’s not really a sympathetic character in the whole feature, unless you count the 450 journalists being shown the door because the Government won’t let the BBC raise the licence fee to cover its running costs and the BBC refuses to lower the fees it pays its top presenters (who only stay out of the goodness of their hearts because of course they would get richer pickings on commercial channels) to achieve the same end.

The only person who comes close is the sad-eyed Royal PR guru Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), heart roasted by looking after spoiled man-child Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell in an ill-fitting face mask) – inclined to throw a tantrum should some housekeeper fail to arrange his battalion of teddy bears in the correct order – and clearly desperate to believe the prince could not possibly be at fault. However, the idea that you would let such a dope loose on Newsnight, facing one of the world’s toughest interviewers in whippet-lover Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), shows remarkably poor judgement, especially when the prince just can’t see what all the fuss was about when he was doing the right thing by standing by his old pal, a convicted paedophile.

Anyone expecting proper investigative journalism or a thrilling narrative up to standards of All the Presidents Men (1976) or Spotlight (2015) – where the journalists actually do the hard work of the digging rather than just regurgitating a story that’s already out there, albeit with a bit more gloss, and the luxury of a one-hour time slot – would be looking in the wrong place.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had discovered just a little bit more about Bernstein and Woodward’s personal lives, whether they owned dogs or had girlfriends or maybe a sick mother, just to fluff out the story a bit, but luckily Alan J. Pakula had more to worry about than what clothes his Woodward and Bernstein had to wear when confronting their subjects.

The BBC high-ups, when not toddling off to sit in boxes at the opera, come across as up their own backsides. Sam is shown to be an outsider, who, unfortunately, dresses like she’s going clubbing, which gets everyone’s back up, but, red card here, seems surprisingly ignorant of the juicier details of the story she’s investigating.

Netflix has been on a roll with The Crown so presumably thought any story with a royal connection would be equally a ratings winner, not realizing that you still need interesting characters to snaffle the viewers and no number of angst-ridden people is going to cut it.

I can’t vouch for the truth of the impersonations of real characters, but while Gillian Anderson seems to catch the essence of Emily Maitlis, Rufus Sewell’s intonations are very much the actor’s own while the face mask seems to wobble from time to time. Billie Piper got the thumbs-up from Sam. I doubt if Amanda Thirsk would care for her worst PR moment to be dramatized but Keeley Hawes at least lends her gravitas.

Suicide by television is the best way to describe the prince, locked into a self-serving version of himself as charming war hero best suited to modelling Army uniforms glittering with medals. However, it struck me at the time and I was reminded of this omission here, that none of the investigative journalists have sought to investigate the small matter of the Pizza Express alibi. I would have thought it would be relatively easy to establish if Andrew was there on the night in question. Directed by Philip Martin.

This only goes to prove that not only can you lead a horse to water but without much encouragement you can get it to drown itself.

The original interview is better value than this. But we should perhaps thank Netflix for allowing its rival a moment in the sun.

Surely no director has cut his cloth according to his means more than M. Night Shyamalen. After a series of big-budget failures, he returned with a series of low-budget numbers like The Visit (2015) and Split (2016) with a couple of forays into television to keep his hand in. And although his movies sometimes don’t work, usually from over-ambition, he is still a brand name and as a triple-hyphenate one of the few working directors to completely control his output.

So the starting point is you don’t know what you’re going to get, except there will be twists and occasional shocks along the way. Even the Glass films aren’t a trilogy in the accepted sense of the word.

Old is a neat idea. A group of strangers on vacation end up on a strange beach where time moves along at quite a clip and they can’t escape. Most of the action involves the characters responding to one calamity after another and despite a couple of gruesome moments Shyamalan seems intent on swapping jump-out-of-your-seat moments for a continual slow burn. He takes the disaster trope of who’s gonna die next – the bad old guy or the cute younger person – and inverts it until nothing makes any sense except impending apocalypse, at least for all stranded in this apparent paradise.

Speeded-up life makes for speeded-up dread. While wounds heal in seconds and pregnancy might last, oh, a half hour or so, the malfunctioning body malfunctions at lightspeed.

The great thing about Shyamalan is he is a writer first so the characters here are all very well drawn. He gives a geeky kid the geekiest of all character traits, going up to everyone he meets to ask their name and job. But it’s an ensemble picture so nobody is more important than anybody else. And the characters bring along a hamper full of tensions – there’s an epileptic, a couple on the verge of divorce, a doctor on the verge of a breakdown. He also has a distinctive visual style, preferring to track the camera from one character to another rather than using cuts.

It slightly runs out of steam as the body count mounts and it might have been an idea to introduce the shock ending – which asks significant questions about the direction society is heading – a bit sooner

There’s a solid cast, good actors rather than A-list stars, a bundle of whom are best-known for television. Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004) takes pole position in the credits, supported by Rufus Sewell (The Man in the High Castle television series, 2015-2019), Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps (Das Boot, 2018- 2020), Ken Leung (Lost, 2008-2010), and Abbey Lee (Lux Aeterna, 2019). Scions of Hollywood royalty get a leg-up here – Francesca Eastwood being the daughter of Clint and Alexa Swinton cousin to Tilda – and there are cameos from the likes of Embeth Davidtz (Schindler’s List, 1993)

Otherwise it’s a decent addition to the Shyamalen oeuvre, enough at least to keep him chugging along until he gets the next big idea or budget. While the chances of him alighting on another Sixth Sense (1999) or Unbreakable (2000) might appear remote bear in mind the guy has barely passed 50, an age when top directors are just coming into their prime – Hitchcock was a few years older when he hit the hot streak of Rear Window, Vertigo and North by Northwest.

There’s a fair chance the ending is uncomfortably close to science fact rather than fiction and if Shyamalan can activate social media along those lines the picture could build up enough of a head of steam to bring the director back into the big-budget Hollywood fold or ensure at least that he is never cast aside.

Saw this at the cinema as part of my Monday double bill. – but on the previous week to Suicide Squad/Jungle Cruise.

Tag: Rufus Sewell

Scoop (2024) ***

Old (2021) *** – Seen at the Cinema