Murder Is Easy review: BBC’s Christmas Agatha
Christie adaptation is bland and incoherent
‘Rye Lane’ star David Jonsson tries to assert his
authority, but is forced to navigate his way around a convoluted plot
Nick Hilton
8 hours ago
“How can
someone murder three people in an English village without it being noticed?”
This simple question is at the heart of what has made Agatha Christie the
world’s most popular novelist. How is it that England’s green and pleasant land
can be so riddled with people willing to poison, stab and bludgeon their
neighbours? It is a premise that has become a core part – ho ho ho! – of the
BBC’s festive programming, which returns this year with a 1950s spin on
Christie’s 1939 novel, Murder Is Easy.
On the
train to London, Luke Fitzwilliam (Rye Lane’s David Jonsson), freshly arrived
from Nigeria, encounters a curious old lady, Lavinia Pinkerton (Penelope
Wilton). “I have to report,” she tells the young civil servant, ominously,
“murder.” Miss Pinkerton has, she believes, witnessed two – maybe three –
murders, but before she can arrive at Scotland Yard she’s mowed down by a rogue
motorist. Coincidence? Not in the mind of Fitzwilliam, who immediately heads to
Miss Pinkerton’s village, Wychwood, to investigate the crimes. There, he teams
up with Bridget Conway (The Rings of Power’s Morfydd Clark), a former secretary
who is now engaged to the obnoxious Lord Whitfield (Tom Riley). As they nose
around the village’s business, their mutual attraction grows, just as the body
count rises.
On his
jaunt in the country, Fitzwilliam encounters a bevy of British TV character
actors: Tamzin Outhwaite, Mark Bonnar, Mathew Baynton, and Douglas Henshall
(among others). It may not quite match the wattage of the 1974 Murder on the
Orient Express (Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud,
Vanessa Redgrave) or the 1978 Death on the Nile (Mia Farrow, David Niven, Jane
Birkin, not to mention Maggie Smith and Bette Davis), but it’s a decent lineup.
The sort of decent lineup we’ve grown accustomed to in recent festive Christie
adaptations. With Kenneth Branagh doing his big screen best (which is not very
good) tackling the Poirot novels, the BBC has chosen to adapt a series of
Christie’s less celebrated standalone works: The Pale Horse, Ordeal by
Innocence, Witness for the Prosecution, and now Murder is Easy. It is a
decision that gives them the freedom to experiment, without fear of being held
in contrast to the great adaptations of the past.
That
freedom here is best expressed by a new interest in late-colonialism and middle
England’s racism. Jonsson’s Fitzwilliam represents the first time a Christie
protagonist has been played by a Black actor, and the narrative embraces that
new development. “Behold the imperial African,” Fitzwilliam’s friend at the
West Africa Club announces. “Self-colonised, collaborating with his
oppressors.” As with all creative decisions that promote a more diverse and
inclusive agenda, it will provoke both the tabloid media and easily offended
viewers, but many of Christie’s works are thoroughly engaged with the
consequences of empire. Bringing the action forward by a couple of decades
allows the creators to gerrymander some more progressive ideals into the story.
While Christie’s views might not have been expressed in quite such bluntly
liberal terms (“Gordon likes to collect nice things,” Bridget observes, of her
fiance’s treasury of African artifacts; “Not really his nice things though, are
they?” Fitzwilliam responds), there has always been a sufficiently
distinguishable native thread of interest in these matters for it to be
extrapolated out to a broader canvas.
This is
something the show does well enough, but it is one of the few things to achieve
even basic competence. Where Sarah Phelps’s adaptations for the BBC (And Then
There Were None, for example, or her reimagining of The ABC Murders) were
shrouded in a very modern darkness, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s adaptation of
Murder is Easy falls between two stools. Too bland to excite the violent
impulses of the Line of Duty generation, yet insufficiently zippy or playful to
stir Christie aficionados. The script is only part of the problem: more
striking, perhaps, is the cheapness of the design. Rather than shooting for the
murkiness of Scandinoir, Murder is Easy manages to be both over-saturated and
over-exposed, while the costumes, locations and cars all have that counter-intuitively
anachronistic air of being “vintage”. It is striking that, in the 34 years
since David Suchet’s Poirot first aired on ITV, the aesthetic quality of
Christie adaptations seems to have regressed.
Against
this unsatisfying backdrop, Jonsson tries hard to assert his authority. It is
never easy playing a disposable dick – neither Poirot nor Marple; never going
to spark a franchise – but Jonsson is not aided by what the kids are calling
CRF (chronic rizz face). “Bridget, why are you marrying that man?” he purrs at
Clark’s vivacious temptress. Both are in the Tommy and Tuppence mould – spunky
and selfless – yet, like most things with this adaptation, more washed out than
intended. They navigate their way around a convoluted plot like Theseus
delicately, clumsily, returning to Ariadne.
If British
television wishes to continue adapting Christie’s novels – which doubtless it
does, given there are many that are yet to receive a primetime airing – then
they’d be advised to remember what makes them so popular. Propulsive,
compulsive plots, a distinctive vision of Britain in the first half of the 20th
century, and a radical, by the standards of modern mysteries, coherence. Murder
might be easy, but a good murder mystery is far less straightforward.
Murder is Easy on BBC One review: give this
silly, self-important take on Christie a miss this Christmas
Murder may be easy, but watching this is hard
MELANIE
MCDONAGH
23 HOURS
AGO
On the
Third Day of Christmas the BBC gives us … one of the least congenial Agatha
Christie adaptations I can think of.
I have
nothing, obviously, against murder at Christmas, though in Murder is Easy there
is something of an embarrassment of riches. It’s the way, yet again, that
contemporary preoccupations are foisted onto a period piece where they are
simply not at home.
It’s not
that the novel is good enough to get worked up about. It’s not, frankly, one of
the great lady’s best, though she does prove, yet again, that spinster ladies
are a force to be reckoned with.
And even
for those of us who are up for festive homicide, there are rather too many in
this story – I lost count after four – for us to care especially about the
victims. Personally I stopped caring after the maid who swallowed hat paint
instead of cough linctus.
Still, the
beginning is promising. It would take a hard heart not to be entertained by an
elderly lady called Miss Pinkerton – here, a daffy Penelope Wilton –
unburdening herself on a train to a sympathetic young retired policeman, Luke
Fitzwilliam, just back from India, about the number of murders in her little
village. She’s off to Scotland Yard to tell them. Except, you know what? She
doesn’t get there.
But before
we even get to that point, this production, adapted from the novel by Siân
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre goes off-piste with a very odd (for Agatha Christie) prelude
showing a young black man – David Jonsson as a very comely Luke Fitzwilliam –
running through a forest, pursued by unseen forces. And whereas the original
detective is former Indian service, this Luke is Nigerian and is taking himself
off to London to work for a bigwig baronet in Whitehall.
But you
don’t think the production is going to leave it at that, do you? Oh no. No
sooner does Luke find his cousin at a West African Education Centre, he’s in
for a roasting from his cousin’s wife for working for a Colonial Butcher and,
for good measure she declares Luke is self-colonised and collaborating with the
oppressors.
No wonder
the poor man takes himself off to Miss Pinkerton’s village in deepest shiredom
to investigate her serial killer theory. And if it seems far fetched for him to
try to pass himself off as a cultural anthropologist investigating links
between death practice in the shires and Nigeria, you can blame Agatha
Christie.
Inevitably,
Luke encounters all the petty prejudices you might have expected from the
locals – not least Lord Whitfield (Tom Riley hamming it up for all he’s worth),
a boy from the village made good through war profiteering.
It's not
just colonialism that Ejiwunmi-Le Berre is gunning for with this adaptation.
Nope. It’s the wicked lord, who’s out to grind the faces of the poor by using
his ill gotten gains to set up a new model town.
The rustics
resent it, and so does the tiresome vicar, Humbleby (Mark Bonnar) who lambasts
Lord Whitfield over dinner for not spending the money on affordable housing,
thereby ventriloquising Angela Rayner.
The trouble
with this village – and the fault is the author’s – is that there are just too
many potential serial killers in it. One is Mathew Baynton (Horrible Histories)
as Dr Thomas who signals his horrible nature by showing Fitzwilliam his little
volume on Racial Selection; the quest for the Master Race.
It's hard
to take the novel seriously, and it’s impossible to take this silly,
self-aggrandising, preposterous adaptation at its own estimation. Give it a
miss. Look, at this time of year, there are charades to be played, pudding to
eat up, relations to entertain; don’t shun any opportunity not to watch this.
Murder may be Easy; watching it is the hard part.
Review
Murder Is Easy review – shines a whole new light
on this Agatha Christie classic
This inventive take on a vintage crime tale replaces
an English police officer with a Nigerian attaché. It tackles race, feminism
and class, while still being quintessentially English
Rebecca
Nicholson
Wed 27 Dec
2023 23.00 CET
Iwonder if
the best call an actor can get from their agent is the offer of a part in an
Agatha Christie adaptation. The opening credits for Murder Is Easy offer a
tantalising roll call of big TV names, including Penelope Wilton, Mark Bonnar,
Mathew Baynton and Jon Pointing, but the thing about a murder mystery in which
the murderer has a rather long hitlist is that most of them appear for only a
scene or two. It seems as if it could be one of the easiest gigs in town.
The busiest
of the lot, though, is Industry’s David Jonsson, who stars as Luke Fitzwilliam,
refashioned from the retired English police officer of the original novel into
a Nigerian attache, who has travelled to the UK to take up a position at
Whitehall. The action, of which there is plenty, has been moved forward a
couple of decades, to 1953, and there are reworkings of certain characters and
plot points. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s tweaking of the story
suggests an inventive and imaginative new take on the 1939 original. The first
half takes the most liberties with its source material and is by far the
strongest, hinting at Fitzwilliam’s divided loyalties as a member of the ruling
elite and a colonised subject of a nation close to independence. His
conversations with his Nigerian friends in London, about pride, duty and
obligation, make the prospect of him being dropped into a mostly white country
village in the mid-20th century even more tantalising a dramatic prospect.
Yet this
early promise soon fades into the background as Murder Is Easy settles in as a
quintessentially BBC Christie adaptation. Fitzwilliam meets a woman named
Lavinia Pinkerton (Wilton) on a train. Pinky, as she is known to her friends,
tells him she is on her way to report murder – note the vagueness as to how
many murders she is planning to report – and ropes him into a guessing game
that casts him in the role of lead detective, though for the sake of this
version, it is in an amateur capacity only. Pinky’s previously sleepy village
has seen the deaths of too many residents for it not to be suspicious, and she
is on the verge of joining the dots and exposing the responsible party.
Intrigued
by the bait Pinkerton has left for him, Fitzwilliam travels to the village to
investigate, meeting a classic murder-mystery cast that includes the vicar, the
doctor and the lord of the manor. But there is an element of class war here,
too, as the neighbouring village, where the poor people live, begins to boil
over with resentment at how the rich are treating them, not least in the
planning of a new town, which appears to be upsetting everyone within a 20-mile
radius.
It throws a
touch of feminism on to the fire, as the self-proclaimed “averagely observant
secretary” Bridget Conway (Morfydd Clark) teams up with Fitzwilliam to add her
better-than-average observation skills to the hunt for the killer; she notices
details about hat colour and heels, for example, that only a woman might
notice. And Fitzwilliam himself becomes a curious new presence in the village,
accepted, in that he is part of the establishment, and also reminded that he is
an outsider, covertly and overtly, when one of the villagers turns out to have
a small private library of books on eugenics. It even touches on the ethics of
the collection of historical objects from colonial nations, though in the end,
it observes more than pushes the point.
Murder Is
Easy begins to struggle under the weight of all it is trying to do and, by the
second episode, the focus starts to fade, and its light touch is lost, as it
both overexplains and underexplains what is going on, depending on the scene.
Fitzwilliam talks about who has power and why it matters; other characters
explain that women are often undervalued. It drifts towards the end as if it
has run out of steam, and it feels strange for the festive Christie to be set
at the height of summer – a tennis-whites Christmas, perhaps.
The cast of
Murder is Easy standing ensemble in the midst of a forest, David Jonsson's Luke
in the foreground, holding an umbrella. Other cast members are Dr Thomas
(Mathew Baynton), Mrs Humbleby (Nimra Bucha), Rev Humbleby (Mark Bonnar), Lord
Whitfield (Tom Riley), Bridget (Morfydd Clark), Miss Pinkerton (Penelope
Wilton), Major Horton (Douglas Henshall), Rivers (Jon Pointing), Honoria
Wayneflete (Sinéad Matthews) and Mrs Pierce (Tamzin Outhwaite).
Adaptations
of old novels should be free to do whatever they want to the source material.
In this case, the choices made shine a different light on the story, and these
choices don’t force it into a new shape, but instead suggest taking another
look at it, from an angle that might not have seemed obvious until now. It
works perfectly well, though in the end, this becomes more of a routine
whodunnit than it first suggests.
Murder Is Easy review: This finger-wagging lecture on
colonialism treats nostalgia for Agatha Christie's Britain as a thought crime,
writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
By
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
PUBLISHED:
22:01 GMT, 27 December 2023 | UPDATED: 07:22 GMT, 28 December 2023
Christmas
presents come in two varieties: the ones we want and the ones a disapproving
relative feels we ought to get, such as socks, underpants and... Murder Is Easy
(BBC1).
Our Auntie
Beeb can't stand the way we enjoy murder in a 1950s village. All those
spinsters cycling through the morning mist to church, ruddy-cheeked blacksmiths
and lads playing cricket on the green – it's so very English, it must be wrong.
So instead
of giving us the Agatha Christie adaptation we'd like, Auntie devises something
different that will be 'better for us'. That is the equivalent of serving a
tofu turkey and insisting: 'It tastes just as good, and it's saving the world.'
This means
taking a pre-war tale from the Golden Age of British detective fiction and
turning it into what director Meenu Gaur calls 'a great allegorical story about
colonialism'.
The sleuth
is a young black man newly arrived from Nigeria, who claims to be researching
local folklore while really investigating a string of murders.
Instead of giving us the Agatha Christie adaptation
we'd like, Auntie Beeb devises something different that will be 'better for us'
In Wychwood
under Ashe, it's 1954 and locals are being killed off so fast the coroner can't
keep up. Death certificates are being handed out in pairs.
Spoiler
alert if you haven't seen it yet, but the publican drowns, a flighty maid
swallows poison, the window cleaner falls from a parapet and the dear little
old lady investigating these deaths (Penelope Wilton) is run down by a car.
So far, so
good. But it feels there are worse crimes than murder in the eyes of writer
Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre.
The village
is a seething hotbed of racism. Our detective, Luke Fitzwilliam (David
Jonsson), has only to walk into a pub for the whole place to fall silent. The
lord of the manor makes sneering remarks about 'mud huts' and the doctor is
handing out tracts on purifying the white master race.
'Now do you
see?' mutters Auntie Beeb. 'That's what your precious English village was
really like. Fascists, the lot of them.'
This is a
21st-centurL Left-wing lecture, drumming in the conviction that Britain after
the war was a truly terrible place and we should all be ashamed of it.
Nostalgia is a thought crime.
The opening
scenes of this two-parter are inspired not by Agatha Christie but by the West
African legend of a man who makes himself invisible to go hunting.
'Becoming
part of another culture, which is what empire and colonialism is,' says Gaur,
'means part of us as people becomes invisible.'
In a dream
sequence, Fitzwilliam is seen clutching an ebony artefact called an ikenga, a
double-horned figurine, which he drops as he is chased through a forest.
The sleuth
is a young black man newly arrived from Nigeria, who claims to be researching
local folklore while really investigating a string of murders
This is a
left-wing lecture, drumming in the conviction that Britain after the war was a
truly terrible place and we should all be ashamed of it
In
tonight's second episode, he reveals that the ikenga represents a man's sense
of self and destiny. He also slips surreptitiously into his lordship's study,
where he is horrified to discover a collection of African masks, fetishes and
carvings – cultural treasures that are plainly the plunder of empire.
This is
hardly the first time the BBC's loathing of Christie has been apparent. The
2015 version of And Then There Were None was sexed-up with nudity, while in
Witness For The Prosecution the following Christmas, David Haig played a senior
barrister who unleashed a barrage of four-letter words in the Old Bailey
courtroom.
In 2020,
the plot of The Pale Horse, admittedly not one of Dame Agatha's finest, was
comprehensively rewritten – with the result that it was even worse than the
book.
But no
rewrite has gone as far as this reinvention of Murder Is Easy, and numerous
details ring false. Some are comical: Fitzwilliam is grudgingly accepted by the
locals when he dons a bow tie and dinner jacket, as though this was the
definitive mark of a gentleman.
Some are
contradictory: village GP Dr Thomas (Mathew Baynton) is a toadie who refuses to
give proper treatment to those who can't pay. This might have been plausible in
1939, when Christie wrote Murder Is Easy, but the adaptation has been shunted
forward to the NHS era. The doctor's prejudice now makes no sense.
Some are
lazy: Morfydd Clark as flirtatious Bridget calls herself a 'seckerterry', which
was certainly not the 1950s pronunciation of 'secretary', and Fitzwilliam
addresses her as Ms Conway, not Miss. And some are just bizarre: Fitzwilliam is
attacked by a bird of prey, a red kite, when he arrives at the manor house. Red
kites were extinct in England in the 1950s – perhaps the writer was thinking of
herring gulls?
Being a
Christmas Christie, it does at least have a good cast. Douglas Henshall is
particularly fun as an old buffer who served in Africa, and Mark Bonnar made
the most of his role as Reverend Humbleby by dropping dead at a dinner party,
making a recovery, and dropping dead again on the tennis court.
Whether
he's permanently dead this time, we shall find out tonight.
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