If Saltburn left you craving more class envy and death in a grand country house then pile your plate high with The Lesson. You also get another helping of Richard E Grant at his most brutally awful. At his best, in other words.
Like Saltburn it’s the story of an outsider invited to spend some time with a very la-di-dah family. Liam (Daryl McCormack) is a very smart would-be writer taken on to act as the tutor (the film’s original title) to the son of the nation’s favourite novelist, JM Sinclair (Grant). The job: get son Bertie (Stephen McMillan), a shoegazey heap of attitude and entitlement, into Oxford.
Also in residence, as Liam soon is, is JM Sinclair himself (Grant), a man so high on his own supply that a reckoning is surely coming. His wife Hélène (Julie Delpy), who’s some sort of art curator and as near to normal as this family comes, and Ellis (Crispin Letts) the butler, a man who can be relied on to be quiet about where the bodies are buried, possibly because he buried them there himself.
In the background a dead son, Felix, whose name shall never be uttered – and so it increasingly is – and in the foreground Liam’s uncanny ability to memorise whole sheaths of literature, which you can bet will become a plot pivot later on, what with JM’s latest hotly expected novel being in the works.
Since this is all plot driven, saying more would ruin the fun, but director Alice Troughton gets McCormack out of most of his clothes early on, to indicate buffness and set up an expectation – who’s Liam going to tup? Or, in the manner of these things, is he going to be at the receiving end of a rogering, physical or metaphorical?
And in another bit of heavy-handed teeing up, we repeatedly hear Sinclair whanging on about writing – in flashback to a disastrous interview and at other times to anyone in the house who’ll listen. Great writers steal, it boils down to, a witty aperçu that Sinclair has stolen from TS Eliot (though Picasso said something similar). So who’s stolen from whom?
That’s it, a dance to the finishing tape, with The Servant vaguely hovering as a template (is the servant going to become the master?) though the most obvious reference point is obviously Saltburn – Liam is black and Irish and so a double outsider, but he has his wits and his physique and he’s hungry for what Sinclair has.
Grant is fabulously rancid as Sinclair, a man who’s traded in his humanity for fame and is a world-class bully and top-flight dispenser of the withering put-down. What a great performance this is – With Nails, Grant called his memoir (a nod to Withnail and I, his most famous role), and this has plenty of them.
McCormack you might remember being in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, with Emma Thompson. He trails along here, giving more than the role really demands, pulling intelligent faces and making out that what Troughton is serving up isn’t a very familiar proposition, though it is done with style and wit. Like the score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, all thrillerish strings and pseudo-farce piano, almost everything in this film can be traced back to the long-running British TV show Midsomer Murders.
Like Midsomer Murders this is all about the joy of the familiar. We’re fairly sure there’s going to be a takedown of Sinclair, but who’s going to deliver “the lesson” – his scornful Lady Macbeth of a wife, his broken intimidated son, new arrival Liam, or possibly even Ellis. Surely the butler isn’t going to do it?
The Lesson – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
