As The Lost King‘s opening credits fly across the screen in kinetic angles, with Alexandre Desplat’s score whirring histrionically in the background, we are given a pretty direct allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. If you’ve already seen the trailer for The Lost King, you might be a little puzzled by the tactic, and especially so as the film in no way pays off on any promise of being a thrill ride. If Stephen Frears’ new film resembles any Hitchcock film, it would be the much more somber Vertigo, as both films have a protagonist who becomes consumed by obsession – though the comparisons quickly end after that. It won’t be the last time that a moment in The Lost King leaves you puzzled, as Frears struggles to balance his interest in manufacturing intrigue with the treacly human interest story that he’s given.
It’s sometimes difficult to rectify the Stephen Frears of the 80’s and 90’s – a director who highlighted the darker edges in his best films, like My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons or The Grifters – with the Frears we see today, crafting the kind of stodgy English dramas that his early films would put to shame. His stories are usually well-meaning – liberal in a way that the Brexit crowd can still enjoy – but the vitality has all but vanished. His best film in the last twenty years, 2013’s Philomena, is an endlessly watchable drama that succeeds because of how it showcases its lead actress, Judi Dench. And to be sure, the best parts of his contemporary filmography is his ability to give actresses of a certain age a proper opportunity to flourish, another obvious example being Helen Mirren winning an Oscar for The Queen.
The Lost King follows this same template, casting the great Sally Hawkins as Philippa Langley, a working mother who suffers from M.E. (as she describes it: chronic exhaustion). The film opens with Philippa missing out on a much-expected promotion and watching it going to a younger, less-experienced candidate. She immediately confronts her fumbling boss who denies she lost the promotion because of her age, her sex or her condition, but Philippa is unconvinced. The argument immediately crystalizes the central theme of The Lost King: people are unjustly judged by things out of their control, whether it be their gender or their disability, or whatever excuses those in power can use to continue being unfair. It’s in this mindset that she sees a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III with her son, and becomes struck by the bard’s harsh interpretation of the king’s life.
The Richard III of Shakespeare is a cruel murderer and a royal usurper, equipped with a hunchback to enhance his villainy. Philippa doesn’t enjoy the way Richard’s outward appearance is made to represent his inner evil, and more so, she doesn’t feel like it’s accurate. Thus begins a life-changing quest to prove that the understood wisdom about Richard III is corrupted by Tudor bias, that Richard’s life was not, in fact, one of brash villainy but of misunderstood vulnerability. She walks out on her job and joins the local chapter of the Richard III Society, a gang of fellow internet obsessives who squawk about accepted history with a tinge of Q-Anon paranoia. They complain of a Tudor conspiracy to hide the truth about Richard from the world. Most importantly, she learns that, to this day, no one knows the place where King Richard was buried.
Having given up everything else, Philippa goes on a full-time search for Richard’s grave. She finds little encouragement. There is some from her ex-husband, John (Steve Coogan), who tries his best to assist her but often fails to hide is skepticism. Then there is archaeology professor, Richard Buckley (Mark Addy), who finds Philippa’s entire quest to be ridiculous but accepts her money when her learns he’ll soon be out of a job. Beyond them, Philippa is met with universal cynicism, including several people who use her M.E. as an argument against her. The only true support she gets is from a lucid hallucination she has of King Richard himself (played by Harry Lloyd), who visits her often, listens to her plights, offers her insight, and interjects into her conversations, usually for comic effect. Her trust eroded, it’s only the vision of Richard that she trusts, as she develops an emotional attachment to the figment of her imagination.
Frears takes Philippa’s visions of Richard at face value, not only accepting the reality of her conversations with the titular lost king but accentuating that these conversations were invaluable to her search and her own self-worth. In Philomena, Steve Coogan played Martin Sixsmith, the journalist who accompanies Judi Dench’s Philomena on her search to find her lost son. Part of the film’s satisfying arc is the way Coogan articulates Sixsmith’s acceptance of Philomena’s religious beliefs with the grave injustice done to her by the Catholic church. The Lost King doesn’t have a character who gives Philippa the same kind of push-and-pull, her main villains are cartoonish, greedy municipal figures who wish to take the credit for he impassioned search. The end result is that Philippa’s retrograde monarchism is accepted as a virtue.
That The Lost King‘s script is written by Coogan and Jeff Pope – the same duo who wrote Philomena – is an interesting wrinkle, and you can see the similar interest. In both scripts, there is nobility in their main character’s obsession, but there’s quite a leap between trying to find a stolen child and wishing to rehabilitate the reputation of centuries-old king. And then we have Sally Hawkins, the veteran English actor whose brilliance is both understood and occasionally taken for granted. For me, giving Hawkins the chance to lead a movie is enough, and in The Lost King, she does imbue Philippa with an exquisite amount of grace and empathy – and almost gets you to accept the thornier aspects of the script. Because this is a Frears film, there is some success in the more emotional (see: manipulative) moments, but outside of a Hawkins showcase, there is not much here.
Directed by Stephen Frears