‘Wicked Little Letters’ achieves an all-time high of Low Comedy
“Wicked Little Letters” — 3.5 stars
A brilliantly brutal barrage of verbal obscenities in the bawdy “Wicked Little Letters” achieves an all-time high in Low Comedy.
Not since “Richard Pryor: Live on Sunset Strip” elevated F-bombs to a comic art form has a movie managed to make marvelous merriment from lewd and rude material, here a series of mercilessly malevolent missives.
Thea Sharrock’s crisply directed “Wicked Little Letters” tells the fact-based story of a friendship gone sour and an epidemic of poison-pen letters that became a public scandal with police investigations and courtroom trials in the quiet English village of Littlehampton during the 1920s.
Someone with artistic penmanship, an educated vocabulary and an obsession with inventive vulgarities has been sending shocking letters to key townspeople, utilizing language that makes the demon’s comments in “The Exorcist” sound like something from a children’s story.
A devoutly religious spinster named Edith (played with droll comic pitch by Olivia Colman) seems to be a favored target. The movie opens with Edith receiving her 19th letter in the mail, prompting outrage from her domineering, misogynist father (Timothy Spall, a sublime master of scene-chewing) and her frail mother (Gemma Jones).
Edith knows the person responsible for all this.
Everyone knows the person responsible for all this: It must be the town floozy, Edith’s disruptive Irish neighbor and former bestie, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley, whose crooked smile and fiery eyes clearly define this character).
A defiant, independent single mom, Rose parties all the time at the local pubs, drinks, enjoys “furious jumping” with her supportive black lover Bill (Malachi Kirby) and sticks her thumb in the eye of public decorum.
Local policemen, doofus characters worthy of a Monty Python skit, are easily persuaded to lock up Rose, especially Hugh Skinner’s clueless Constable Papperwick and Paul Chahidi’s blustery, self-important Chief Constable Spedding.
In the midst of this blanket miscarriage of anything resembling justice, observant and skeptical Police Officer Moss (Anjana Vasan, gifted with empathic, whirlpool eyes) violates protocol by launching her own unauthorized investigation. She must suffer not only her dimwitted colleagues, but daily doses of not-so-thinly veiled racism and sexism thoughtlessly practiced by the predominantly white community.
As more and more letters show up, each one more imaginatively depraved than the last, the local news media turns Edith into a heroic celebrity, a brave and noble Bible-reader cruelly victimized by the mystery character assassin.
Jonny Sweet’s sharp and stinging screenplay shrewdly explores how easily the public — even the judiciary — leaps to quick conclusions based not on hard evidence, but on emotions, assumptions, likes and dislikes.
And the outcry over things people read in the social medium of their time?
Sweet’s political parable nails that, too, but stumbles three times.
It fails to satisfactorily establish how Rose and Edith found enough common ground to become best friends, given their divergent personalities, class, education and cultural histories.
Second, the movie’s expected big reveal arrives way too soon and squanders a much more effective emotional payoff had it been delayed.
Third, the story forgets to tie up a key loose end involving a terrible event inadvertently caused by those nasty letters.
Nonetheless. Sharrock boldly and precisely pairs both Low and High Comedy elements in an outrageously engaging exercise that, like “Women Talking” and a few other films, relegates male characters to supporting parts, a welcome reversal of Hollywood’s heavily male-dominant productions during the past 100 years of cinema.
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Starring: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Timothy Spall, Gemma Jones
Directed by: Thea Sharrock
Other: A Sony Pictures Classics release. Rated R for language, sexual situations. 100 minutes