Wednesday 27 December 2023

Murder Is Easy reviews.

 


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

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/murder-is-easy-review-david-jonsson-bbc-b2466573.html

 

“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

https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/tvfilm/murder-is-easy-bbc-one-agatha-christie-review-david-jonsson-b1128561.html

 

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

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/dec/27/is-easy-review-shines-a-whole-new-light-on-this-agatha-christie-classic

 

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

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12904991/Murder-Easy-review-finger-wagging-lecture-colonialism-treats-nostalgia-Agatha-Christies-Britain-thought-crime-writes-CHRISTOPHER-STEVENS.html

 

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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