Been waiting to see this! Finally going to see it on Tuesday – it’s a long weekend here and the cinemas will be too noisy (I like to hear my films without distractions).
*** (out of five)
Alex Jennings plays Alan Bennett exactly as you’d always imagined him – stuffy, witty, and ludicrously British – in this adaptation of Bennett’s novella, and subsequent play, which told the true story of an old lady who lived in her van in Bennett’s driveway in Camden for fifteen years. Maggie Smith plays the old lady, and twenty members of the cast of Bennett’s play The History Boys appear in the film. It’s as cosy as a home-cooked steak and kidney pie.
Early on, an actor in Bennett’s West End play at the time says of it, “It’s so English. Just what people want.” Like everything in Bennett, the line is being terribly clever, speaking, as it plainly is, about the film you’re watching. This vehicle – see what I did there? – delivers everything a Maggie Smith-loving Anglophile could possibly desire, including dry wit, acerbic wit…
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