Wicked Little Letters is a 2023 British black comedy mystery film
directed by Thea Sharrock and written by Jonny Sweet. The film stars Olivia
Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Malachi
Kirby, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, and Timothy Spall.
Wicked
Little Letters premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival on 9
September 2023, and was released in the United Kingdom by StudioCanal on 23
February 2024. The film received mixed reviews from critics.
Based on a
true scandal that stunned 1920s England, the story centres on neighbours Edith
Swan and Rose Gooding in the seaside town of Littlehampton. One day, a series
of obscene letters begin to target Edith and the other residents, with
suspicion falling upon Rose. As the outrageous letters continue to escalate,
Rose risks losing both her freedom and custody of her daughter. Police Officer
Gladys Moss is determined to find the real culprit, and along with a group of
other women, seeks to solve this perplexing mystery.
Review
Wicked Little Letters review – a deliciously
sweary poison-pen mystery
The true tale of a foul-mouthed scribbler in 1920s
Sussex is given nuance by a stellar cast including Olivia Colman, Jessie
Buckley, Anjana Vasan and Timothy Spall
Ellen E Jones
Sat 24 Feb
2024 16.00 CET
Before X or
Twitter or even YouTube, if you wanted to vent your rage at an unjust world on
a blameless bystander you had to go to the trouble of actually writing a letter
and posting it. These were the days of the poison pen letter, an early
20th-century socio-criminal phenomenon here revived by comedian Jonny Sweet’s
gleefully sweary script and a competent ensemble of British comedy’s finest
directed by Thea Sharrock.
Swearwords,
you see, can be very funny – especially when primly pronounced by a pious
spinster such as Edith (Olivia Colman), who seems to be the letter writer’s
primary target. Or when spurting forth from a potty-mouthed slattern such as
Edith’s neighbour Rose (Jessie Buckley), on whom suspicion immediately falls.
And these swearwords are particularly funny – a collection of naughty non
sequiturs and rococo rantings that derive from the real letters of the
Littlehampton libels, a forgotten scandal that terrorised this small Sussex
town in the early 1920s. “Piss-country whore”? “Foxy-assed rabbit-fucker”?
Epithets this fruity are clearly beyond the wit of man to invent. (And there’s
your first clue to the letter writer’s identity.)
Some credit
should therefore go to Christopher Hilliard, author of the well-researched 2017
book that brought the case back to public notice. It’s Sweet’s script, though,
that successfully folds the true crime tale into an eminently exportable
period-drama package. And it’s the cast – notably Anjana Vasan as the county’s
lone female police officer and Timothy Spall as Edith’s domineering father –
who allow for deeper exploration of the underlying motives for such aberrant
behaviour. Swearing can be comic, but it might also be the way that a highly
pressurised, repressive and patriarchal postwar society lets off a bit of
steam.
The Littlehampton Libels
A
Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England
Christopher Hilliard
Recounts
the story of a poison-pen mystery that led to a miscarriage of justice in a
seaside town in the years following the First World War
Offers a
convincing account of a painstaking and ingenious police investigation into a
libel case
Recovers
the words and word-play of working-class people in the early twentieth century
Examines
the psychological dynamics of a working-class community
Provides
the most substantial interpretative account of criminal libel in the twentieth
century
Interview
Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley: ‘Never repress
a woman – because it will come out’
Claire
Armitstead
The actors star in a true-life 1920s tale of a
snobbish small town upset by poison-pen letters. They discuss falling in love
with one another, the f-word and the parallels with today’s internet trolling
Claire
Armitstead
@carmitstead
Fri 23 Feb
2024 06.00 CET
On 23
September 1921, a letter arrived at the home of Edith Swan, a laundress in the
seaside town of Littlehampton, addressed to “the foxy ass whore 47, Western
Rd”. One of the milder letters that had been plaguing the Sussex community for
three years, it continued: “You foxy ass piss country whore you are a
character.” Swan blamed a neighbour, Rose Gooding. But the post-office clerk
and the local police had other suspicions, which drove them to rig up a
periscope to spy on deliveries to the town’s post box and marking postage
stamps with invisible ink.
The
combination of filthy poison pen letters and DIY sleuthing in a quaint
small-town setting is a gift for the star pairing of Olivia Colman and Jessie
Buckley. Directed by Thea Sharrock with a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, and
stuffed with classy character actors, Wicked Little Letters blows a raspberry
at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories. It also undercuts the
Downton Abbey image of British social history which, says Buckley, “gives
everybody the idea that people are kind of lovely when actually there’s a
little bit of dirt under everybody’s pretty teacup. Everyone loves a good
swear, even the ones that say they don’t.”
Colman and
Buckley are in high spirits when we meet, having just spent half an hour
filming Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, in which they discussed the
different forms of rudeness with a group of five-year-old boys. Colman,
familiar to them as the conniving innkeeper Mrs Scrubbit in Wonka, bounces in
first with a “fart” app, which she has installed specially for the occasion.
“It’s so good, I can’t stop,” she says, letting off a peal of whoopees, as
assistants scurry around ensuring she and Buckley have everything they need.
“Oh sorry, that’s too much,” she apologises, after miming along to a
particularly sonorous one. “OK, I promise I’ll stop,” she says, giving vent to
another as her co-star settles into the seat next to her. It’s an impromptu
improvisation of delighted gaucherie reminiscent of the one that propelled her
2019 Oscar acceptance speech for The Favourite into the best-ever league.
Colman and
Buckley became best friends after meeting through a Letters Live event at a
festival in Oxfordshire, at which Colman’s contributions included a humorous
letter from a 17th-century naval officer to a creditor, and Buckley read a
declaration of love from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats. “We stayed up late doing
karaoke,” says Buckley. “Yes, we just sort of fell in love with each other,”
adds Colman, who went on to recommend her new friend to play her younger self
in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s award-winning adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel The
Lost Daughter. Though the separate timelines meant they didn’t have any scenes
together, they continued their after-hours bonding, “singing, playing guitar,
swimming in the sea and drinking rosé,” says Colman. “I’m sure we are kindred,”
adds Buckley. “Yes,” replies Colman. “It should happen more often – outside and
inside work.”
When Wicked
Little Letters came up, on which Colman and her husband, Ed Sinclair, are
producers, she suggested Buckley again, though this time for a character who is
the exact opposite of her own. While middle-aged Edith tends to the town’s
laundry and dutifully keeps house for a tyrannical father, Rose is a free
spirit who roisters with the sailors in the pub when she is not waging domestic
war on her sister and her seaman husband, who is known not to be the father of
her young daughter.
The
Littlehampton libels became a national sensation, debated in parliament and
filling the newspapers with prurient outrage. As filming began, the apparent
outlandishness of the drama was put into perspective by a more recent scandal:
the Wagatha Christie case – which pitted Coleen Rooney against Rebekah Vardy,
highlighting the offstage enmities of the footballing world – erupted into the
courts and the press with its own barely credible story of female betrayal and
amateur sleuthing. “Ooh, we were all gripped by that,” says Colman.
In the
film, as in life, it doesn’t take long to work out that Rose is not to blame
for the letters, which are gleefully recited at length from the originals that
were produced as evidence in the resulting court hearings. The mystery in both
cases is not whodunnit, but why – and how it could be possible for those
charged with upholding the law to be so snobbishly prejudiced that they refused
to believe the evidence in front of their eyes. When Edith Swan was put on
trial, the judge ordered a jury to “consider whether it was conceivable that
she could have written this document” given that her “demeanour in the witness
box was that of a respectable, clean-mouthed woman”.
By the time
the truth was accepted, Rose had spent two spells in jail. Her only fault, says
Buckley, was her refusal to conform. “She was basically judged for being a
single mother, which is hard enough without having the whole rest of the world
condemn you for it. She wanted to be as uncompromisingly free and full and
joyful as she possibly could be, and that does come with consequences.”
Though the
language of the letters might appear startlingly extreme, it reflects a real
shift that social historians have attributed to the stresses of the first world
war. Swearing accelerated at a such a pace that, by 1930, the editors of a
collection of British songs and slang noted that, among soldiers particularly,
the word “fucking” was so common that it was merely a warning “that a noun is
coming”. The same licence was never given to women, and in many quarters still
isn’t. Buckley, who is 34 and grew up in Ireland, has an early memory of being
banished to the back step for swearing. “I remember feeling half ashamed and
half like it’s just a word and I probably meant it. I was going for gold: this
was my revenge, my revolt against the back step.”
Colman, who
has just turned 50, had a different experience growing up in Norfolk: she can’t
remember a time when she didn’t know the F-word. “My mum or dad always swore
and it was never in anger, just in normal conversation. Dad would say:
‘Where’ve I put the fucking car keys’, or mum would say: ‘Shall we have a cup
of tea? Yes, fuck it, let’s have a cup of tea.’ So I’ve got no time for people
who would happily watch a murder on telly but whose sphincters tighten at the
idea of some woman swearing in the 1920s.”
She does,
though, add a caveat: “If you hear someone in the street who’s really angry,
swearing at another person, of course that’s scary and shocking.” Wicked Little
Letters treads this line: the language might be funny, but the emotions
powering it are not. Though in some ways it tells a story of its time, which is
handled with “a dollop of artistic licence”, in other ways it is a startlingly
resonant portrayal of the rage unleashed in women who are subjected to coercive
control.
“Never
repress a woman – because it will come out,” says Colman. “Rose manages to
escape. But Edith is stuck in this place where she’s still under the thumb of
her father in her late 40s. And it was only through writing these letters that
she got some sort of a release. So it is serious. It’s the way women were
treated in that period. And how far we have come, I suppose, is open for
discussion.”
In
particular, Colman points out, there is a parallel with the internet trolling
of today. “I think Edith sees Rose and thinks: ‘Oh my God, life could be
different.’ And, you know: ‘Fuck you for being what I want to be.’ She probably
feels bad initially, but then it’s like a drug and she can’t stop. It’s so
gratifying. It’s trolling. She has anonymous power and a thrill from hurting
someone, which is awful. And it’s happening now on a much greater scale.”
People are
complicated, agrees Buckley. “I guess ultimately everyone wants to be seen. As
Frankenstein’s creature says: ‘I’m malicious because I’m miserable.’ If you
lock somebody up, they’re going to become lonely, and they’re going to cause
damage.”
Partly
because of a fear of trolling, neither actor uses social media. “I don’t want
to see all that. I don’t want someone I’ve never met to be unkind. I don’t
understand it, and I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. And I really feel for
our youth,” says Colman, who has three children. “As a teenager I was able to
make my mistakes in private, you know, but now, you’ve got to be so careful. I
feel sorry for them. And I want to tell them to just walk away from it.”
Which begs
the question, what exactly do two such successful actors think they might find
themselves trolled for? “We’re not going to tell you that,” they chorus, while
agreeing that doing work that makes them cringe is part of any performer’s lot
because mistakes happen all the time, even if nobody else notices.
Buckley,
whose first break was as one of the hopefuls in the TV reality show I’d Do
Anything, auditioning to play Nancy in the West End musical Oliver (she came
second and turned down the consolation prize of an understudy role), now
alternates between music, theatre and film. The soundtrack of the 2018 film
Wild Rose – which drew all her strengths together in the portrayal of a
Glaswegian wannabe country-and-western singer – reached the top of the UK
country albums chart. She won an Olivier award in 2022 as Sally Bowles in the
West End production of Cabaret, but is now on a film roll that will shortly
include a Frankenstein film, The Bride, directed by Gyllenhaal, and a screen
adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. But it’s not all plain sailing, she
says. “You spend most of your time trying to convince people to give you a job.
And then you’re like: ‘Oh my God, I was terrible.’ Or: ‘This is awful’, but you
just keep going.”
Colman, who
became a national treasure with TV roles including DS Ellie Miller in the crime
series Broadchurch, and Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, has developed such bad
stage fright that she thinks she may never act in the theatre again. Her last
appearance was at the National Theatre in 2017, as the stuck-at-home daughter
of an ailing mother in Lucy Kirkwood’s drama of science and sibling rivalry
Mosquitoes. “I started in theatre and loved it so much,” she says. But when her
children got to the “pyjama-time-cuddle-on-the-sofa-before-bed age”, she
stepped back. “And I think I’ve left it too long – the fear is too great. Oh,
God. I feel it’s so far to fall now. And then there’s my menopause brain, and
the fear that I wouldn’t be able to remember an entire play. When you’re
filming, you can look and learn on the day, get it wrong, and get to go again.
But if you’re on stage, and you’ve forgotten your soliloquy … everyone knows
that fear, but I don’t know if I can face it again. Maybe when I’m in my 80s with
an earpiece …”
Both actors
are fiercely protective of the Edith Swans of this world – difficult women
whose circumstances have driven them to challenging behaviour. “What does that
even mean?” demands Buckley. “Are you challenging or difficult because you
actually want some autonomy and want to be part of a world that engages you
instead of putting you in the corner and pretending that we’re all parlourmaids
who witter away to each other and drink tea? Because that’s never been my
experience as a woman.”
Buckley has
the wind in her sails and is not going to stop there, as Colman looks
admiringly on. “First of all,” she pronounces, “we should all be able to take
space and stand up and educate our minds and have autonomy of our bodies and
feel like we are entitled to pleasure and desire that is ours and not bound by
a system that decides those things for us. And so if that is challenging to
you, it shouldn’t be, because the other option is crippling and actually causes
more damage across the board.”
For all the
pain and havoc caused by the Littlehampton libels, they did have a positive
outcome of sorts. Gladys Moss, the dogged PC who investigated the case and is
played in the film by Anjana Vasan, recently had a blue plaque dedicated to her
in the Sussex town of Worthing, in recognition of her pioneering work as the
county’s first woman police officer. Edith Swan was finally freed from her
father, even though it took a jail sentence to do it. This thought sends the
two friends off on a reverie about what sort of prisoner she would have been.
She would have been a mother hen who taught the younger prisoners how to read
and write, says Colman. “Yeah,” picks up Buckley, “she’d be like: ‘You know
that F-word? I want you to write it out a hundred times.’”
Wicked Little Letters is released in the UK on
23 February
No comments:
Post a Comment