IDK abt AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE (1995)

Never smile at a pedophile.

On Wednesday, I went to see Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, a relentless Bergmanian nightmare that tackles such issues as generational poverty, drug addiction, and infanticide—and which was still, somehow, the second darkest movie I watched last week.

Based on the 1989 novel of the same name, An Awfully Big Adventure follows sixteen-year-old Stella, an actress-cum-stagehand who finds herself navigating the politics and personalities of a repertory theater company in post-war Liverpool. It stars Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, and a delightful murder of English grande dames such as Prunella Scales and (one of my faves) Nicola Pagett. Now, I’d never heard of this movie till I added it to my Watchlist, but given what I know of director Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter, etc.), I felt confident that I knew what to expect: a sentimental idyll on stage life in the early fifties, and the magic of the theater, both onstage and off. I expected something, I think, along the lines of Finding Neverland, or maybe the 2003 adaptation of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which, while certainly not a good movie, is still the perfect cup of slightly milky, slightly lukewarm tea. But right from the start, I could tell something was off—probably because I couldn’t, for the life of me, follow what was happening. Indeed, as we chased Hugh Grant through the London side streets, you could find me inching closer and closer to the edge of my seat, saying “What is going on?”, at first at a whisper, then louder, more urgently. This is due, in part, to the film’s deeply uncharismatic heroine, Stella, who’s played, perhaps tellingly, by no one you’ve ever heard of. Given a passing understanding of basic narrative structure, you might expect Stella to climb the ranks of the theater company, to make friends and enemies with its stars and stagehands, and to perhaps even learn something along the way; but she simply drifts through the film with her mouth agape, a not-so-sexy baby who’s sexualized at every turn—crass, dumb, and honestly a little vile. But I don’t mean to victim blame, because An Awfully Big Adventure is vile from top to bottom: the insane character beats, the racist asides, and Hugh Grant’s cigarette-stained fingers, clearly a detail mentioned in the book, and which Newell brings to life by painting his entire index finger a revolting shade of yellow. But just as I resolved to write it all off as bad, the movie takes a truly bewildering turn—and the conflict pivots from “Will the gang’s production of Peter Pan be a success??” to pedophilia, incest, and multiple suicides. And then it ends—without warning or catharsis—leaving me to ask, one final, despairing time, “What is going on!” It’s not so much a tonal mess as it is a tonal nightmare: Park Chan-wook torture porn packaged as a delightful English romp. And if it didn’t feel so, well, criminal, I might have to applaud Mike Newell for having the courage to make it. As it is, I’m shocked they’d ever let him near a children’s movie after this.

NEXT TIME!