BEFORE: Alistair Petrie carries over from "A Little Chaos", and a rare Birthday SHOUT-OUT to Lesley Manville, who appears in tonight;s film - born March 12, 1956. Also born on March 12 were First Lady Jane Pierce in 1806, painter Elaine de Kooning in 1918, Australian feminist author Anne Summers in 1945, Liza Minnelli in 1946 and Senator Tammy Duckworth in 1968. And on March 12, 1912, the Girl Guides were founded, which later got renamed as the Girl Scouts.
THE PLOT: An American widow finds unexpected love with a man living wild on Hampstead Heath when they take on the developers who want to destroy his home.
AFTER: It's kind of hard to get a read on this film, like is it a romance or not a romance? There's romance in it, but it's a very weird one. And which character is the star of the film, the hermit squatter played by Brendan Gleeson, or the widow who lives across the street, who watches him through binoculars and finds herself weirdly drawn to him? You can't really divide the film up 50/50, at some point the director really needed to make a decision here about who the lead is.
The squatter, called Donald Horner here, is based on a real person named Harry Hallowes, who camped out on a piece of abandoned land beginning in 1987, after being evicted from his flat in Highgate. Yes, I said "flat", not "apartment", remember that the British don't speak our English, they've got different words for a lot of things - like they call cookies "biscuits" and they call our biscuits "scones" or something. They call our fries "chips", and they call our chips "crisps", because they're crispy, which is almost as bad as calling cookies "cookies" because they were once cooked. Why don't we Yanks call them "bakies", that would make about as much sense. Honestly, I'm not even sure I favor American English over Brit-speak - they call soccer "football" which makes perfect sense because you use your feet all the time in that sport, and American football players hardly ever kick the ball, so really, WE should come up with a new name for American football, only it's far too late for that. And I'm going to steal a joke from Hannah Gadsby here, they call gasoline "petrol", which is short for "petroleum", and that makes perfect sense. Shortening it to "gas", as Americans frequently do, makes no sense, because it's a liquid, not a gas. I think if I moved to the U.K. I'd be all caught up in a week, but I probably still wouldn't call a truck a "lorry" or an elevator a "lift". What do they call an escalator, a "stairsy-wairsy"? Or a "moving apples and pears"?
Anyway, while we're on the subject of things with different names in the U.K., here in the U.S. there's a thing called "squatter's rights", which makes it very hard for building owners and landlords to evict people, even if those people are behind on their rent, or don't pay any rent at all. In the U.K. they call this "adverse possession", which is a principle by which somebody occupying a piece of land for a long period of time, and the property owner does not exercise their right to regain possession of the land, the person possessing it gains a form of ownership of it. It's kind of like "possession is 9/10 of the law" combined with "Finders keepers, losers weepers". That's what happened to Harry Hallowes, who ended up owning the half-acre he was living on, supporting himself by doing odd jobs for locals, including director Terry Gilliam.
There's no record of him having a relationship with a flighty American widow, so that whole part of the film could be a Hollywood addition to his tale. There's so much about her story that I found very confusing, like, for example, what's her deal? And, why does she have money but also shows no understanding of how to make more, or how to hang on to the money that she has? Why does she keep falling further and further into debt, to the point where she eventually has to auction off her things and sell her flat? And what is the deal with that flat, anyway, is it a condo or a co-op or a converted hotel? It's very unclear. She lives in part of a giant complex and she serves on the planning committee, but I'd still like to know what the specifics are, it's got a desk clerk working, like a hotel would. And I guess maybe her dead British husband owned it and so she inherited it, but since her only job is working in a "charity shop" (I guess that's what they call antique stores or thrift stores over there...) that job's not going to pay for the upkeep on her flat for very long.
So, really, her main concern SHOULD be to get a job that pays a little more so she can keep living the way she's accustomed to, but no, she'd rather get close to the man who lives in the rundown shack - is she genuinely interested in him, or just looking for an escape from her pending personal bankruptcy? The film makes a point of mentioning that Donald doesn't SMELL like a typical homeless person would, perhaps because he swims every day in the river next to his ramshackle house. And where IS this house, exactly? They talk about it as if the house is "on the heath", but doesn't that mean out in a field, or in the woods? How can Emily's building be just across the street, if his shack is out on the heath? And then why do people talk about the property he's on by calling it "the abandoned hospital", did it used to be a hospital, and if so, what happened to that building, where did it go? Do they really mean "the empty lot where the hospital USED to be, only it's not there any more, but we still think of it as the hospital, just so we all know what we're referencing?" That seems stupid.
I mean, if the hospital's been gone since 1987, probably a lot of people who remember it aren't even AROUND any more, and even if they are, they've probably known it as an empty lot much longer than they knew it as a hospital, so then call it "the empty lot", right? Oh, sorry, Brit-speak - call it "the tract" or "the patch" or whatever. More language barriers here - Emily and Donald spend time together in the "loft", which is what an American would call an "attic" - and in the U.S., there are entire apartments just called "lofts", which is an apartment without any walls separating the rooms - another stupid definition because a loft should mean an upper region, or the upper part of a multi-level place, and so in some loft apartments, there is no loft. See? American English is so dumb. But it's a bit weird that there's even an attic at all in this building, like does each unit have an attic? No, there's one big shared attic, umm, loft, where all the residents keep their spare stuff. Awkward.
There's not even a plot summary on Wiki for this film - I know it's running on cable now, but considering how little box office this film made in the U.S. in 2017, I get the feeling that practically nobody has ever seen this film. That can't be true, but I keep thinking that one day I'm going to stumble on to a film that absolutely NOBODY has seen, and it wouldn't be for lack of publicity, it would just be this little film that's so far under the radar that even the people who had heard of it would think, "Oh, sure, I'll get to that film someday, there's no rush..." and then they'd all just never follow up. Then I'll come along and watch it and be the first, and then maybe some of my loyal tens of readers will follow suit, and then I'll have taken this tiny film with no traction and increased its viewership tenfold. It's bound to happen one day, I just need to find the world's most obscure film, which isn't easy to do.
My all-time favorite headline from the New York Post - the newspaper that was responsible for "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and "Huma Cuts Off Weiner" (Anthony Weiner, that is") - ran when the police found out that a homeless man had been living between the supports of the Manhattan Bridge, he'd built something there that looked like a treehouse, a little shanty that had a bed, a makeshift stove, a pantry and a reading lamp. But the police had to tear down his little rent-free non-apartment, because of the danger that it would fall apart and pieces would block the bike lane. This led to the headline "Bridge Over for Troubled Squatter". Genius.
Also starring Diane Keaton (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Paddington 2"), James Norton (last seen in "Little Women"), Lesley Manville (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Jason Watkins (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Phil Davis (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Simon Callow (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Peter Singh (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), William James Smith (last seen in "Greed"), Rosalind Ayres, Brian Protheroe, Alex Gaumond (last seen in "The Hustle"), Hugh Skinner (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Adeel Akhtar (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Deborah Findlay (last seen in "Jackie"), Stavros Demetraki.
RATING: 5 out of 10 petition signatures
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