The Choral
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Written by Alan Bennett
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Roger Allam and Mark Addy
Classification PG; 113 minutes
Opens in select theatres Jan. 9
While Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral is, above all, exceedingly polite, there is no need to be genteel about the movie’s qualities. This is a period piece of insignificant impact and distressingly drippy intentions, its filmmakers so concerned with their project being considered handsome and respectable that they fail to spark any emotional response beyond the most passive of shoulder shrugs. So, yes, it makes perfect sense that, after a ridiculously presumptuous bid to push it into the awards conversation, the film is being quietly shoved into general release during the second week of January.
Set in 1916 in a fictional Yorkshire town, The Choral follows the struggles of a local choral society that is forced to contend with an increasingly diminishing number of male members, who are gradually sent off to fight in the Great War. To reverse its fortunes, and to lift the locals’ spirits, the group enlists the leadership skills of Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), who is an undeniably brilliant musician but also an easy target in town, given that he’s spent the past few years of his life in Germany without regret or remorse. Can Guthrie heal the town – and perhaps the country! – before it is torn apart by conscription? I’ll give you a few guesses.
Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Henry Guthrie in The Choral.Nicola Dove/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media/Supplied
Predictable and staid to a fault, Hytner’s film is a sleepy tour through all the kind of wartime clichés that you can imagine, and a few that you possibly did not even previously consider. I’ll give the director and his regular screenwriting partner Alan Bennett a bonus point for inserting the most unlikely of first-base sex scenes. Not even Fiennes, who appears to be pushing against the sheer rote-ness of the material at every turn, seems to be enjoying himself.
It would be unfair to say that the dull narrative and flattened aesthetic of The Choral are par for the course when it comes to Hytner, who boasts an intimidating history on the stage (as artistic director of London’s National Theatre) and a bumpier background on the screen (his 2015 dramedy The Lady in the Van is a long way from his strong 1994 adaptation of The Madness of King George). But nearly every moment of The Choral drowns in mounds of self-seriousness, with the genuinely heartbreaking tensions of the era smoothed into a kind of dramatic pablum.
If you somehow find yourself dragged to a showing of The Choral – say at a matinee at an urban cinema à la Toronto’s Varsity Cinema, regular audiences there having already screened the best of the late-December awards contenders – then just sit back and think of England.