Mr Pip

Synopsis: During a civil war on Bougainville in the early 1990s, Mr Watts (Hugh Laurie) is the last white man left in a village. He won’t leave his wife, who is insane. With the school closed down, he re-opens it and reads the children Great Expectations. It catches their imaginations, especially of Matilda, and leads to conflict with her mother.

There’s a scene in Vincente Minnelli’s magnificent 1952 Hollywood takedown, The Bad and The Beautiful, in which Kirk Douglas’s Jonathan Shields sits back after watching his first directorial effort. He thanks each of the department heads in turn, congratulates them and the actors for their work, then comments that someone should have sacked the director. I feel that way about Mr Pip, a film that should work far better than it actually does.It’s not that there’s anything bad about the film per se, it just fails to come together into a coherent and emotionally powerful whole, although you can see it trying to. The actors are all very good, delivering strong and engaging performances. The cinematography and production design is good too.

There’s cleverness in relocating scenes of "Great Expectations" to tropical locations with black actors, but it’s delivered so flatly that the cleverness drains out leaving nothing but beautiful locations filmed in uninteresting ways. But really, the detours into Matilda’s imagination aren’t the big problem here. Instead it’s that Mr Pip is maybe four different films all vying for your attention.

The first film is a story of Matilda struggling to love a home which is full of horrific memories of war atrocities. It’s hammered into you with the quote “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home”. This could be an interesting story but it’s quickly subsumed by a second one.

Mr Watts is a strange man who stays on the island because his wife is insane. He parades around town with a red nose carrying her behind him. Who is this man, why is his wife insane, why does he stay? The mystery is intriguing but is quickly discarded as he begins to read "Great Expectations".

Which leads to story three, as Matilda’s mother reacts to her daughter’s preoccupation with the Dickens story in a simple-minded fear that it will lead the girl to Satan. She becomes obsessed with shutting down the storytelling sessions and ensuring everyone turns back to God. In fact, she takes things far too far. And her guilt at the consequences of her actions would be an interesting story too, if the film bothered to explore them rather than devote two short scenes to papering over them before a shocking dénouement pays them off. It’s just poor editing at this point I feel, since you can tell what’s meant to be going on, even if the tone and pacing pull you away from it.

Finally, there’s the overarching idea of showing the human cost of copper mining. It’s how the film opens and is kind of how it closes too. It’s not very effectively worked through the story though. The war on the island is in the background but it’s a shock when it hits the village rather that a payoff to a long awaited fear. A few short scenes establish it’s going on, but the story becomes so consumed with the adventures of Pip and Matilda that you forget about it just as quickly.

Mr Pip is a film that got my grump on. And it’s because there’s obviously plenty of good material, good ideas and some clearly talented people working to bring it all to life. But it’s a mush in the end and deeply unsatisfying.

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