Carey Mulligan at her most magnetic plays one half of an estranged folk duo booked by lonely superfan Tim Key in what deserves to be this summer’s breakout hit
The Ballad of Wallis Island
(100 mins, 12A) Directed by James Griffiths; starring Tim Key, Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan
For a film about grief, regrets, lost love and a deep, cavernous loneliness, The Ballad of Wallis Island delivers a whole lot of laughs. This droll British picture, about an eccentric lottery winner who books his favourite folk-rock duo for a private gig on the wind-flayed island where he lives in splendid isolation, is so sharply observed and infectiously funny that you don’t at first notice that it plays out in a mournful minor key. Tonally it’s Life Is Sweet-era Mike Leigh meets John Carney’s Once, with a touch of the gentle lo-fi Brit eccentricity of Jim Archer’s Brian and Charles – a bittersweet, cardigan-clad small treasure of a film and a balm for battered souls. If there’s any justice in the world it should be the breakout hit of the summer.
Charles (Tim Key) is a McGwyer Mortimer superfan. He cherishes the memory of an autograph and a chat with them at the stage door of the Colchester Corn Exchange. His bobbly, hand-knitted jumper, emblazoned with whale motifs, is a nod, we suspect, to the title of one of the fictional band’s early tracks. Alone in his crumbling Victorian mansion on Wallis Island, Charles blasts their album Way Back When (on vinyl, naturally) at full volume, filling the draughty rooms with delicate, crystalline harmonies. He’s so giddy with excitement at the arrival on the island of Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden), one half of the now long defunct and bitterly estranged duo, that he’s oblivious to the fact that he and Herb are not remotely singing from the same song sheet.
Herb glowers behind his Ray-Bans and his regulation rockstar uniform of black skinny jeans and prickly self-absorption. He is, he makes it clear, slumming it by accepting a gig this small. What Charles has omitted to reveal is just how small the audience will be (the current tally is just one – Charles – unless any errant puffins stray from the north side of the island). And there’s another detail that Charles failed to mention: he has also booked the other half of the band, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), engineering an awkward reunion between the former lovers and musical collaborators who haven’t seen each other in nearly a decade.
Tonally it’s Life Is Sweet-era Mike Leigh meets John Carney’s Once
The film itself is a reunion, albeit a more harmonious one. It’s based on, and expanded from, a 2007 short film, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, which, like the feature version, was directed by James Griffiths and written by and starred Key and Basden. In the intervening years, all three have independently accrued impressive bodies of work. Griffiths established himself as a successful TV director (A Million Little Things, Cooper Barrett’s Guide to Surviving Life) and made his feature directing debut with the salsa-dancing comedy Cuban Fury, starring Nick Frost. Basden created and starred in the sitcoms Plebs and Here We Go. Key is a comedian, poet, actor and writer whose roles include Alan Partridge’s Sidekick Simon, Father Ambrose in Wicked Little Letters and, most recently, the Pigeon Man in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. These are talents that have been honed over the years, and it shows.
Basden, who also wrote and performs all of the lovely, noodling folk tracks that make up the McGwyer Mortimer back catalogue, is terrific as an abrasive, self-important man finally confronted by his own arrogance and fakery. And Key is a revelation; Charles, with his heartbreaking eagerness and gauche verbal tics, has the hilarious, earnest pathos of an early Timothy Spall performance. He generates more laughs from a repeated joke about his character’s inability to master the etiquette of door closing than many films muster in their entire running time. Meanwhile, Mulligan, with her melted-honey voice and a smile so warm it almost seems to shift the film’s colour palette, is at her most magnetic. Her arrival on screen is like a break in the clouds in the scowling skies over the island (the film was shot on a rain-lashed stretch of coast in Carmarthenshire, Wales). And if the picture has a fault, it’s that it might have benefited from more Mulligan.
There’s a hint of hope for Charles, and the possibility of an end to the loneliness he fills with his unfiltered stream-of-consciousness babbling chat. Gentle Amanda (Fleabag’s Sian Clifford) runs the only shop on the island and seems receptive to Charles’s inept overtures of friendship. But the devastating secret weapon of The Ballad of Wallis Island is the gradual way in which Charles’s grief and loss take shape; in the traces of his late wife dotted around his home. A wonky, hand-thrown mug emblazoned with the word “Hubby”; a yellowing, pencil-drawn cartoon tacked to the wall; a message of love written on a floating lantern: there’s a cumulative power to these small details that grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go.
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