The Duke
The late Roger Michell didn’t mean for The Duke to be his final narrative film, but as unintentional swan songs go, it’s a surprisingly apt one.
The fact-based, 1961-set comedy about 60-year-old Newcastle cabbie Kempton Bunton (the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent) stealing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery shares much of the same humanist DNA as many of Michell’s films while also serving as somewhat of a reflection piece.
The director of such varied genre works as Notting Hill, Changing Lanes, and the documentary Tea With the Dames, Michell was 65 when he unexpectedly passed away in September 2021, and perhaps saw some of himself in Kempton — an amateur playwright and activist who nobly campaigned for Parliament to give free TV licenses for veterans and the elderly.
Kempton also can’t keep his mouth shut, resulting in delightfully righteous showdowns, job turnover, and short prison stints. But when he sees the country spending £140,000 on the painting — an amount that he notes could pay for a lot of TV licenses to help keep British citizens connected — he decides to make his biggest point yet and steal the artwork. Well, sort of.
Additional layers are lovingly woven in by the writing team of Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, constructing a thoroughly convincing, lived-in world in and around the Buntons’ modest home. There, Kempton’s stodgy wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren) and fellow activist son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead, Dunkirk) provide a compelling push-and-pull dynamic regarding Kempton’s actions, while the sudden resurfacing of his troubled oldest son Kenny (Jack Bandeira, Gunpowder Milkshake) and his girlfriend Pammy (Charlotte Spencer, Cinderella) further spice things up with their wild card natures.
Like numerous Ken Loach films, similarly set in Northern England, The Duke could use subtitles to help with dialogue comprehension, but enough filters through to convey the above drama as well as the family’s lingering grief over the loss of their daughter a few years prior.
The Buntons’ domestic travails are sufficiently intriguing for The Duke to sustain viewer attention, but the film’s bookend chapters of Kempton on trial for his crime add another welcome wrinkle and prove that Michell and his collaborators are just as skilled at handling courtroom drama. Yet suspenseful as the proceedings are, seeing as our man has a very real chance of going to jail for the rest of his life, barrister Jeremy Hutchinson (Matthew Goode) efforts to convince the jury of his client’s (relative) innocence are dotted with Kempton’s wild witticisms while on the stand and earns plenty of big laughs.
The impressive tonal juggling provides a fitting capstone for Michell, whose skills are on full display in what very well could be his best film. As such, it’s a touching sendoff for a talented director whose diverse contributions to cinema will be sorely missed.
Grade: A-minus. Rated R. Now playing at the Fine Arts Theatre
(Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)
