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You are here: Home / Arts / Film Review: Mirren, Broadbent and Company Ennoble ‘The Duke’

Film Review: Mirren, Broadbent and Company Ennoble ‘The Duke’

May 5, 2022 by Evans Donnell

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Photo by Mike Eley, BSC. Courtesy of Pathe UK. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

For decades the Brits have seemingly cornered the market on films about eccentrics. real and imagined; they typically produce entertaining cinema around such unconventional folks with equal parts humor and poignancy. With Kempton Bunton, the Don Quixote of 1961 Newcastle, “The Duke” adds another entertaining movie to that character-fueled canon.

Bunton (Jim Broadbent) is the voice crying in the wilderness of post-World War II Britain for better treatment of pensioners and war veterans. His perpetual campaign for the downtrodden and forgotten is, at the time the film is set, centered on the mandatory television license fee required of anyone owning a TV set in the United Kingdom (a practice that still funds the BBC).

His activism has resulted more than once in incarceration, and between his protests and prolific (but commercially unsuccessful) playwrighting his long suffering wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren) has basically reached breaking point. Her husband promises to change his ways, but that promise seems broken quite soon when Kempton finds himself at the center of a headline-screaming story about the theft of Francisco Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery (so far the only time that august place has had a painting stolen since it opened in 1824).

Photo by Mike Eley, BSC. Courtesy of Pathe UK. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Richard Bean and Clive Coleman’s sweet-natured and nimble script largely encompasses the true story that followed, including Bunton’s trial and its aftermath. That doesn’t mean it’s historically accurate in all respects, of course: the real story, should you choose to look for it, is readily available in various online articles. But in just 96 minutes we get a vivid portrait of the social divisions and personal conflicts – such as a family tragedy that drives much of Kempton’s thoughts and feelings – that led to a case which ultimately changed British law.

Roger Michel’s direction makes the most of location and the script’s fast pacing, but it’s the performances of the cast that make this more than a celluloid anecdote. Broadbent, Mirren, Fionn Whitehead as Kempton and Dorothy’s son Jackie, Anna Maxwell Martin as Dorothy’s employer and Matthew Goode as Kempton’s defense barrister are all very believable and likeable. They ennoble “The Duke” with their work, and make the film more pleasing than it might otherwise have been.

“The Duke” opens Friday (May 6) in Nashville at Regal Green Hills Stadium 16 and in Franklin at AMC Thoroughbred 20. It’s rated R for language and brief sexuality by the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). Click here for more info and tickets to showings at those theaters and others elsewhere.

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Filed Under: Arts, Film, Reviews

About Evans Donnell

Evans Donnell wrote reviews and features about theater, opera and classical music for The Tennessean from 2002 to 2011. He was a webmaster, writer and editor for the original StageCritic.com site (2004-2011) as well as now-defunct ArtsNash.com and NashvilleArtsCritic.com sites from 2012 through 2018, where he additionally wrote about film. Donnell has also contributed to American Theatre magazine, The Sondheim Review, Back Stage, The City Paper (Nashville), the Nashville Banner, The (Bowling Green, Ky.) Daily News and several other publications since beginning his professional journalism career in 1985 with The Lebanon (Tenn.) Democrat. He was selected as a fellow for the 2004 National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and for National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) arts journalism institutes for theater and musical theater at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2006 and classical music and opera at the Columbia University School of Journalism in 2009. He has also been an actor (member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA), founding and running AthensSouth Theatre from 1996 to 2001 and appearing in Milos Forman's "The People vs Larry Flynt" among other credits.

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