GRANT PLAYS IT GRIM IN 'AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE'

By Jay Carr

(Boston Globe, September 1996)

"An Awfully Big Adventure" is a well-made but scattered downer about backstage misery in a Liverpool repertory company in 1947. It reunites director Mike Newell and Hugh Grant, but this effort couldn't differ more from ''Four Weddings and a Funeral." That film was light and loving. This one is almost unremittingly grim. What little love it allows is far off target, and what could have been tough, bracing humor about the apallingly impoverished and demeaning conditions behind the footlights instead plays like a cold, steady rain as the postwar austerity is nothing compared to the emotional austerity.

The reason for most of the blight is the sadistic nature of the company's director, Meredith Potter. As played by Grant behind a pair of spectacles, and with the corners of his mouth almost always curled down in a disapproving sneer, he's pinched and parched, inside and out, suggesting James Joyce on a bad day. It was brave -- or perhaps foolhardy -- of Grant to try something different by playing so unappealing a predator, whose power to hire and fire insures him a steady supply of young innocents he revels in seducing, then discarding with a twist of the knife. It's not the sex he enjoys with them, but the opportunities to manipulate them and then humiliate them in front of the others.

With his lordly ways, he heartlessly abuses the faithful stage manager (Peter Firth, in a nicely understated performance) who has loved him for years, sacks the company's veteran actress, and effortlessly charms a young woman named Stella, whose coming of age is nominally at the center of the story. As played by newcomer Georgina Cates with a helmet of orange hair and a gaze fixed on the future, she's a formidable little presence, too, outwardly humble as she goes about her modest duties, but projecting the hard intensity of the blinkered young. Naivete rolls off her like surf, and Cates beautifully conveys the vulnerability of this born self-dramatizer, who attends funerals so she can enjoy crying to relieve the dullness of life in the drab house of the aunt and uncle who are raising her.

Early on, it becomes apparent that the phone calls Stella makes to her absent mother whenever she's feeling shaky are imaginary. She haunts the theater, dying to be noticed by Grant's callow sophisticate. The one who does notice her, though, with serious consequences to them both, is Alan Rickman, as the dashing actor playing Captain Hook in the troupe's "Peter Pan" (it's a line from Barrie that gives the film its title). He doesn't so much seduce her as happen to be there at the moment she decides the time has come to lose her virginity, and she refuses to give him the satisfaction of an emotional response. Cates makes sure we never lose sight of the tenderness and confusion beneath her veneer, though.

And Rickman's Lothario isn't all bad, although the most warmth comes from Alun Armstrong's salt-of-the-earth uncle whose caring nature Stella finds stifling. A lot of care and craft has been lavished on "An Awfully Big Adventure," and not since the autographical films of Terence Davies has period Liverpool been evoked with so pungent a sense of time and place (ironically, it was filmed in Dublin!). But Newell and his screenwriter, Charles Wood, have made a few miscalculations with regard to tone and structure, and it costs the film. The comic potential in the petty meanness draining the lives away from the characters goes largely untapped as "An Awfully Big Adventure" runs a narrow and not terribly entertaining gamut from the squalid to the sordid.

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page