13/10/2022 - Harry Styles’ performance further sinks Michael Grandage's structurally unsound, bland and superficial film about closeted life

E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice tells of a young Englishman discovering his own homosexuality, of his various infatuations and his first great love — important milestones that are all, always, entangled with intense feelings of guilt, anger and fear: homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967. Forster died in 1970, and though he began writing the novel in 1913, it was only published posthumously. Yet then as now, even at a time when wider British society is more tolerant than it was in his lifetime, the novel’s blistering honesty and its vivid descriptions of feelings of pain and alienation that never lose their sting, make it a vital text for understanding the true extent of the violence caused by this injustice.

Written by Bethan Roberts, the novel on which Michael Grandage’s My Policeman [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is based, is inspired by Forster’s real-life romance with a married policeman; as depicted in both the novel and the film, this policeman’s wife later became a live-in nurse for Forster. Perhaps the utter banality of Grandage’s film would be easier to ignore if Forster himself hadn’t written so beautifully about his own experience as a closeted gay man in 1950s Britain.

One crucial aspect of Forster’s novel is that, while it follows several years of a closeted man’s life, it never slides into bland melancholia or wistful nostalgia: his protagonist’s regrets are open wounds which never heal. Unlike unrequited love, or the natural way in which two people might grow apart, his heartbreaks are caused by an unnatural external force, a cruel law that shouldn’t exist. It’s an injustice he cannot get used to. Grandage’s film is far too conventional and bourgeois to convey such strong and difficult emotions, and the taboo around homosexuality at that time comes across as a ridiculous film trope rather than anything to do with reality. Emma Corrin does a salutary job as young Marion, torn between complex feelings of anger, disgust and heartbreak when she realises what her husband has been up to. But it’s all for nothing because Harry Styles, in the title role as Tom, makes it impossible for audiences to take the story seriously. His odd delivery, which sees him elongating words in order to emphasise them, and his indescribably odd vocal pitch, lend the overall film a hallucinatory feeling and made the audience at the London Film Festival’s press & industry screening erupt into laughter on more than one occasion.

David Dawson is most convincing as museum curator Patrick, a gay man who knows who he is and what he likes, though why he would let the inept Tom embroil him in a marriage with Marion is baffling. The reason, of course, is that he is in love with him, but while Dawson and Styles are refreshingly game during the couple’s beautiful sex scenes, the film fails to conjure the emotional breadth of their romance. This same goes for Marion’s plight: it would be far easier for us to understand why she waits some forty years — despite learning about the men’s relationship early on — to ask herself why she’s stayed with Tom, if we sensed that she loved him at all.

Styles is behind some of the film’s fatal flaws, but the blame cannot be placed squarely on his shoulders. My Policeman is built around flashbacks between past and present-day Brighton, where Marion (Gina McKee, trying her best) now cares for older Patrick (the great Rupert Everett) while older Tom (Linus Roach) refuses to see him — a structure which reduces what could have been a moving story about compromise to a slow and emotionless delivery of information.

Clearly, the intention is to contrast the old couple’s grey yet peaceful life with the intensity of their youth, in order to better highlight their present shared denial. But all it does is underline the superficial and trite understanding of closeted life which lies at the heart of this dull film.

My Policeman is produced by Independent Entertainment and Berlanti Schechter Films. Amazon Prime Video is releasing the film online on 4 November.