Wicked Little Letters

 Wicked Little Letters (2023, Thea Sharrock available on Netflix) is a reasonably entertaining and emotionally satisfying picture, built to flatter its audiences.  The movie virtue-signals aggressively and the viewer is left with the ineluctable conviction that he or she is on the right side of history, righteously indignant about injustices now comfortably in the past.  The movie proposes that its audience is superior to the fractious, morbidly religious fools from whom we are descended.  We are left with the comforting notion that people today, at least the type of people who attend well-made, politically correct foreign films, are far more enlightened than our forbears.  Wicked Little Lies is cartoonishly designed to demonstrate this pleasing proposition and, so, the movie is an effective, and occasionally moving, piece of well-meaning agit-prop.

In a benighted village on England's west coast, apparently near the end of the First World War (the date of events shown is ambiguous), a pious middle-aged woman is harassed by dozens of nasty, colorfully obscene poison-pen letters.  An unknown writer accuses this woman, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) of being a "rabbit fucker", sack of piss, along with other outrageously vituperative libels and calumny.  Edith is a woman of impeccable piety, an old maid who is a pillar of the community, living at home with her awful, bigoted father (played by a scenery-chewing Timothy Spall) and mousy door-mat of a mother.  Spall's character is easily a match in iniquity to the vicious and anonymous letter-writer and he is the unambiguously cruel and hypocritical villain of the piece.  Edith has befriended a foul-mouthed, unconventional Irishwoman, ostensibly a war widow, a trashy piece of work herself but humanized by the script through her doting relationship with her twelve-year old daughter.  The war-widow, Rose Gooding, is vulgar and aggressive, but, of course, we are made to sympathize with her rebellion against the staid and suffocating conventions in the small village -- she has, as it were, a "heart of gold"  notwithstanding her offensive diction.  (Rose is played by Jessie Buckley who is predictably excellent in the part; she can't control her tongue and sneers at everyone.) Edith has tried to befriend Rose, but the two women have clashed and, apparently, the elder Swan has contacted the equivalent of child-protection to have the Irish woman's qualifications as a mother investigated.  It is  in the wake of this intervention that the storm of poison pen letters ensues.  Of course, the outsider, Rose, is accused of being the author of the filthy epistles and, in fact, she's imprisoned in lieu of bail (that she can't pay) pending her trial.  The movie is nothing if not clear about it's political points:  within ten minutes, the audience is convinced by Olivia Colman's twitchy histrionics as the downtrodden, mousy Edith, that she is, in fact, the letter writer.  (There's some dubious psychology in play -- Edith Swan has internalized her father's insults and spews them out as vitriol on the page in letters that she mails to herself.  The film makes it obvious that this compulsion has some sort of sexual aspect; Edith gets a charge out of the obscenity and can't control this impulse.)  A young police woman, continuously maligned and insulted by her male peers and boss, suspects that Edith is the perpetrator of this hoax, but encounters all sorts of  resistance from the men with whom she has to interact.  Her peers, who are all foul-mouthed themselves, want to make sure that Rose is punished for the obscene letters.  The action plays out against a background of suffragette protests, reported in the press (which is also fascinated by the poison pen saga) but never dramatized.  Rose, in the eyes of the film, is triply virtuous:  she's an outsider to the bigoted hypocrisy in the village, she's a proud Irishwoman, and she's a proto-feminist with a Black boyfriend.  The film's characters are ethically ranked according to their race.  There's a fat unhygienic Lesbian (a good guy), a foul-mouthed old lady (a good guy), and the plucky Indian lady cop (a good guy).  This league of virtue is ranged against the vicious old man Swan, the overtly hypocritical white cops, and the (Caucasian) prissy Church ladies (and vicar).  After various complications and set-backs, the good characters prevail and Edith's bizarre letter-writing campaign is exposed.  This is all quite suspenseful and gripping and the movie, although tendentious in the extreme, is well-cast and cleverly written.  

Nonetheless, the film has three major defects which can not be passed-over in silence.  First, the stereotyping in the movie is so extreme as to deny Edith Swan any real agency in the plot.  She is viewed merely as the half-deranged product of sadistic parental bullying by her father -- his cruelty and vituperation has driven her to these bizarre, self-lacerating measures.  This is plausible, I suppose, but it exculpates Edith from fault in a way that is rather too convenient -- the virtue-signaling screenwriter doesn't want to ascribe real villainy to a female character and so imputes her faults to a man, her father.  (Olivia Colman's performance transcends in some ways the limitations of her role, but the part is written in an irritating manner.)  Second, everyone in town curses like a sailor, people throughout the film use ubiquitous vulgarity:  everything is "fucking this and fucking that", characters are said to be "fecking eejits" and, generally, there's a lot of loose language and invective in the dialogue.  If this were the norm as to the way people spoke in 1917 in a small English village then why is everyone so up in arms about the poison pen letters?  It seems that these generally foul-mouthed characters would just shrug off the obscenity.  Third, the film engages in strange "color-blind" casting -- Rose has a Black boyfriend with whom she lives, apparently without much overt scandal.  The Judge in the climactic trial sequence is a handsome middle-aged Black man.  If this village is so well-integrated, then, why is there an animus against the fiery Irishwoman, Rose Gooding?  When the theme of a movie is, in fact, prejudice and bigotry, which is the case in Wicked Little Letters, then, color-blind casting doesn't make sense and, in fact, just clouds the issue.  The movie also as a puzzling triple climax -- you get three endings for the price of one, but they don't exactly cohere:  Rose is proclaimed not guilty in her trial; Rose escapes custody, leads the cops on a merry chase, and, then, confronts Edith in the town square surrounded by citizens -- there, Rose goads Edith into a torrent of obscene vituperation, witnessed by the townsfolk, and clearly establishing that Edith, in fact, is the letter-writer (she uses many of the same colorful expressions in her colloquy with Rose as appeared in the letters.)  Finally, the Indian policewoman, the unclean Lesbian, and the foul-mouthed old lady engage in an elaborate plot to prove the Edith is the letter writer -- this plot involves several felonies in the nature of interfering with the mails and seems vaguely comical and implausible; it's a sort of Emil and the Detectives narrative that's clever but superfluous.  The writer of the movie seems to have had some anxiety about how the picture should (or could) end and so we have several variations presented, a superfluity that attenuates the film's excitement and obscures its climax.  

The film is based on a celebrated true case that occurred in England in 1920.  The screenwriters have not changed the names to protect the innocent or the dead.  Rose Gooding was, in fact, an Irish emigrant to the small West Sussex town, befriended by the older, pious Edith Swan.  Rose had a child out of wedlock but had married three years after her daughter was born.  Edith and Rose were initially friends and shared a communal gardening plot -- Edith hand wrote a recipe for chutney and some knitting instructions for Rose, samples of script that were offered into evidence at the trial.  As shown in the movie, Edith began posting letters to herself, written under Rose's name, accusing her of all sorts of outrageous crimes.  Indeed, Edith went to far as to write to Rose's husband, then serving in the military abroad, claiming that Rose was having an affair with another man.  The source story doesn't involve the wicked father or the helpful Lesbian, Indian policewoman, and foul-mouthed old lady. And the true story didn't have a happy ending -- notwithstanding handwriting proof that the letters to Edith were written in Edith's hand, Rose was convicted of criminal libel and spent a year in prison at hard labor.  (Wicked Little Lies is also similar in some respects to Henri Clouzot's 1943 Le Corbeau, also about a poison-pen campaign in a small village.)