Keeley Hawkes and Hugh Bonneville are decent as the
actor and children’s author whose daughter died aged seven, but there is no
real howl of pain
Peter
Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thu 18 Feb
2021 11.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/18/to-olivia-review-roald-dahl-patricia-neal-sky-cinema
The
unbearable grief of losing a child is a difficult subject for any movie to
encompass – and it defeats this decently acted but syrupy, glib drama about the
early married life of movie star Patricia Neal and children’s author Roald
Dahl, whose seven-year-old daughter Olivia died in 1962 of encephalitis due to
measles. Despite the best intentions, To Olivia winds up creating a carpet of
eggshells for its audience to walk across.
The film
suggests the family were brought closer together by this catastrophe, resulting
in Neal gaining new emotional intelligence for her acting and Dahl being able
to accept creative comments on his work from his family, and so getting crucial
improvements for his 1964 hit Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Maybe – or
perhaps Olivia’s death was an agony that everyone simply had to live with and
live through, and one that may have accelerated Dahl’s existing slide towards
cantankerous bigotry.
It did have
one actual result: Dahl later became a powerful campaigner for vaccination. In
1962, there was no vaccine for measles, a fact mentioned in the postscript.
(Maybe it is not too late to enlist Dahl’s support against the insidious
anti-vaxxers: every Dahl book or movie should come displayed with Dahl’s
vaccination message.)
Keeley
Hawes plays Neal, the glamorous star content to live in a rambling house in the
chilly English countryside, cheerfully putting up with her moody and mercurial
husband, who indulges the children with flights of fancy when he’s not grumpily
putting away the scotch in his writing den. Dahl is affectionately played by
Hugh Bonneville, and inevitably makes Dahl more attractive and personable than
was the case. Then the unspeakable tragedy happens; Dahl retreats into misery,
unable even to say Olivia’s name, and the increasingly lonely and alienated
Neal fatefully decides to head out to Hollywood to act in the western drama
Hud, opposite Paul Newman.
This film
comes to life in the two scenes when its hushed note of kindly reverence is
broken. Neal and Dahl go for spiritual succour to his old headteacher, Geoffrey
Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury – fiercely played by Geoffrey Palmer in
his final film role. Fisher’s blithering, pompous nonsense about animals not
being allowed in the kingdom of heaven enrages them both. Then later, when Neal
meets Newman (Sam Heughan), he coolly declines to engage in the ashen-faced
condolences.
There is no
real howl of pain of the kind that we had in, say in the 1993 movie,
Shadowlands about the personal grief of CS Lewis. To Olivia is cushioned by its
own carefully managed good taste.
Released on 19 February on Sky Cinema.
To Olivia review: A portrait of grief that
struggles to reconcile the two sides of Roald Dahl
The film charts the years after Dahl and his wife,
actor Patricia Neal, lost their eldest daughter Olivia to measles-induced
encephalitis
Clarisse
Loughrey
@clarisselou
Friday 19
February 2021 06:30
Dir: John
Hay. Starring: Hugh Bonneville, Keeley Hawes, Sam Heughan, Geoffrey Palmer,
Conleth Hill. PG, 99 mins
Thirty
years have passed since the death of Roald Dahl and we still wrestle with his
legacy. As a man, he was cantankerous and deeply antisemitic, known for
belittling his loved ones and treating his audience with apathy. On the page,
he’d allow worlds of infinite wonder and impish genius to blossom. To Olivia, a
film by John Hay, attempts to sidestep the matter entirely and tell a story
about grief, in all its universal forms. At times, it feels like a cop-out.
In 1962,
Dahl and his wife, actor Patricia Neal, lost their eldest daughter Olivia to
measles-induced encephalitis. She was seven years old. Emerging from the throes
of grief, the couple would go on to celebrate the respective high points of
their careers – Dahl published Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the US in
1964, to great acclaim, while Neal won the Oscar for Best Actress a year
earlier, for the role of Paul Newman’s hard-bitten housekeeper in Hud.
To Olivia
charts the space in between these events, with Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes
as Dahl and Neal. Grief festers within the walls of their secluded country home
– and inside the author’s famous writing shed, where the film shows him in
private commune with his boyhood self. Presumably, this narrative trick is
meant to explain the source of Dahl’s vast imagination, though it’s never made
clear. All the boy seems to do is stare. It’s a great, wide-eyed look that
seems to be the only thing capable of guilt-tripping the man into writing.
Hay,
alongside cinematographer Graham Frake, beautifully captures how fleeting the
small, magical words shared between parents and children can be. The house
exists in Buckinghamshire and also, seemingly, in Arthurian legend. Mist clings
to the tops of forest trees, and birds – sometimes depicted as a blur of CGI –
roost inside a large, intricate menagerie in the garden. But the fairies and
tea parties start to dissipate as soon as the thick smog of death starts to
roll in.
To Olivia wants
us to see our own experiences reflected in the agonies of the Dahl family. They
cycle through their grief, on both a public and private stage – there are egg
cress sandwiches passed out at the wake, followed by silent tears among the
wreckage of the dead girl’s possessions. But Hay and David Logan’s script is
attempting to wrench its story out of the hands of those it depicts. It
struggles to reconcile the palpable image of a sensitive family man laid low by
depression with the more complicated reality that ran alongside it – that of a
sometimes-tyrant with a great capacity for manipulation. Bonneville does his
best to find some form of communion between the two. There’s a wildness in his
eyes that expresses far more than what’s on the page.
Hawes,
meanwhile, is heartwrenching as someone who’s always expected to be a wife and
mother first, a grieving woman second. But she never fully leans into Neal’s
husky, lived-in drawl, especially when replicating her performance in Hud. The
same could be said for the film’s treatment of Paul Newman, here played by
Outlander’s Sam Heughan. The piercing blue eyes and sharp jawline are all
present and correct, but the film presents him more as a generic Hollywood
blowhard than the genteel, thoughtful man he’s commonly described as. True,
grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw
their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.
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