If you enjoyed The Greasy Strangler and wondered whether writer/director Jim Hosking had anything else in his locker, Ebony & Ivory has your name on it. Imagining Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder meeting on the remote Mull of Kintyre in Scotland sometime in 1981, it’s not aiming for documentary realism – the two musicians met in Montserrat in the Caribbean, for one – and is the sort of whimsy that seems aimed at stoners. And yet there is a kernel of something weird but true going on here.
The British Wool Marketing Board feature in the closing credits, that’s how all over the place this film is, leading to theorising (if only on my part) that Hosking is the British version of Quentin Dupieux, the French film-maker who churns out whackadoodle stuff all the time and occasionally hits a seam of gold.
Opening shot: Macca, played by Sky Elobar, standing on a beach watching a lone rower on the sea gradually approaching him. It is Stevie Wonder, played by Gil Gex, and though he is completely blind Stevie seems to be having no problem at all navigating towards the shore.
Over the next few days the two men will confabulate, chat, digress and interact in Paul’s cosy farmhouse, talking about nothing in particular and getting stuck on stupid minor details – like lapsang souchong tea – repeating words and phrases and concepts at each other as if madly high, though neither seems overly enthusiastic about anything. Neither man has an entourage; there is no one else there except Stevie and Paul. They drink Big Willy’s Big Wee Fizzy Beer. They smoke “doobie woobies”, which live in Paul’s Doobie Woobie Furry Box. Occasionally they will stop for one of “the wife’s” (Paul’s) vegetarian ready meals, always beige, always breadcrumbed food which Stevie reckons is giving him chronic constipation.
They discuss music, in particular whose is cheesier. They even sing Ebony and Ivory, dressed as sheep and baahing it at each other. It looks at times as if a hostage situation might be developing, with Paul as the kidnapper keeping Stevie captive by plying him with hot chocolate and foot rubs.
In a moment the rest of the film largely avoids, Stevie and Paul at one point discuss their songs’ capacity to “change the way people think”. The sort of high-flown guff that stars in their pomp do say now and again, it’s as near as the film gets a political/cultural point – the claim seems ridiculous, not least because these two men as portrayed here are ridiculous.
Late on, the two men go skinny dipping together. The water looks cold but Hosking has kitted them out with prosthetic penises (made by the same outfit that made prosthetic penises for Sean Baker’s Red Road) and since the penises appear to be getting bigger the more Stevie and Paul frolic, you’d class this as a moment of humour.
The whole thing is not so much funny funny as funny peculiar, the real world through a refracting prism so duh it’s almost unrecognisable. As well as Dupieux, who made a film about a sentient rubber tyre and another about a man who falls in love with a suede jacket, there might be a touch of Jim Cummings in here, another auteur who is on the road less travelled with films like The Beta Test and The Wolf of Snow Hollow.
Personally, I love Cummings films and have a lot of time for Dupieux (though he can get a bit exhausting). Ebony & Ivory is a film for people who might be fans of both, who also roll over for the surreal japes of comedy outfits The Mighty Boosh or Flight of the Conchords, who have a passing knowledge of McCartney and Wonder and who might be aware that Macca’s first wife, Linda, is what the references to “the wife’s” vegetarian food are all about.
Elobar’s Macca is pretty good, but Gex isn’t trying too hard to be Stevie, beyond donning a pair of dark glasses. Both men were also in The Greasy Strangler, which took the low-budget video nasty of yore and subjected it to ordeal by ramshackle mockery. I have no idea what Hosking is mocking here. It’s surely not McCartney and Wonder, is it?
Ebony & Ivory – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
