Friday 7 October 2022 02:07 AM Mum who helped unearth king's bones in a car park: BRIAN VINER reviews The Lost ... trends now
The Lost King (12A, 108 mins)
Rating: ****
Verdict: Engaging feelgood story
The Woman King (15, 135 mins)
Rating: ***
Verdict: Packs a punch
Five years ago, in Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-winning The Shape Of Water, Sally Hawkins played a mute who fell in love with a kind of monster, a humanoid amphibian, more prosaically described as half-man, half-fish.
She was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award and in The Lost King she gives another wonderful performance, again as a woman reduced, in this case by the debilitating condition ME, who again falls for a monster: King Richard III.
But just as in The Shape Of Water, the Hawkins character wants the world to know that the object of her obsession is monstrous only by misperception. Richard III, she thinks, has been dreadfully maligned, above all by William Shakespeare.
The implication is clear: Philippa might just be a middle-aged divorcee trapped in a dead-end career, but she identifies with this 15th-century monarch as, it seems, he does with her
So when she learns that the Plantagenet monarch’s mortal remains are ‘lost to history’, she embarks on a mission to find them. And as you will recall, for much of this really happened, find them she does . . . beneath a council car park in Leicester.
Hawkins plays Philippa Langley, a harassed mother of two boys divorced from their father, John (Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope).
Philippa lives in Edinburgh, where she works in a dreary sales job and is passed over for promotion. ‘You are at the right level for you,’ says her condescending boss.
When she then goes with her son to watch a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, she feels as though the King is talking directly to her. From then on, the stage version of Richard (Harry Lloyd) starts coming to her in visions, a device that could feel wincingly arch, but director Stephen Frears makes it work.
And the implication is clear: Philippa might just be a middle-aged divorcee trapped in a dead-end career, but she identifies with this 15th-century monarch as, it seems, he does with her.
Moreover, while history aligns with the Shakespeare version of Richard as a malignant, murderous hunchback, she finds that he was an advocate for the printing press and also introduced the principle of innocence until proven guilty. Every time she visualises him, it is as a handsome man on horseback. She is adamant that he was not deformed.
Off she duly goes to Leicester to find the telltale bones, recruiting a sympathetic lecturer (James Fleet) to the cause and eventually persuading the chief archaeologist at the university (Mark Addy) to let her dig.
However, it is the academics who become the villains of the piece by seizing the credit when, wonder of wonders, the skeleton under the car park does indeed turn out to be Richard.
I should add that Leicester University have strongly denied they sidelined Philippa during this remarkable project, and the screenplay certainly injects the truth with a good dollop of fiction, but then there’s something rather fitting about that. After all, we’re asked to believe Shakespeare did, too.
Whatever the accuracy of it, this is an engaging feelgood picture in which even Philippa’s footwear during the excavation, Union Jack wellies, compounds the sense of a doughty Englishwoman at war with the establishment.
There are also echoes of Philomena (2013), made by the same team of Frears, Coogan and Pope. Judi Dench picked up lots of award nominations for that film, and I suspect the brilliant Hawkins will, too, for The Lost King. In honour of Richard, or maybe not, let’s call it a hunch.
The Woman King also tells a true story, that of a regiment of fierce female warriors in the African kingdom of Dahomey, now a region of Benin, in the 1820s.
The appeal of this film, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, derives entirely from its reversal of gender assumptions
Viola Davis plays their fearless general, Nanisca, quite prepared to lay down her life in the service of a rather complacent sovereign (John Boyega), and similarly prepared to use her long nails to pop out the eyeballs of her enemies.
She’s almost as tough to those on her own side, but sees something of her young self in a new recruit, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), cueing up a tale of virtuoso and apprentice that we have seen a thousand times before in the cinema, only never quite like this.
The appeal of this film, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, derives entirely from its reversal of gender assumptions. If it were about male soldiers, it would seem
