Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
The career of Harry Styles, Movie Star, is shaping up to be an interesting one. After a one-off semi-cameo in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk back in 2017, Styles has decided that, having conquered the world of music (and having emerged as the one victor from One Direction, where I’m assuming he Highlander’d his fellow bandmates for their life-forces), his crossover into cinema would be an enduring one. His appearance at the end of last year’s Eternals implies a multi-film contract, and his two releases this year are generating copious amounts of festival buzz. The most noteworthy of the two is Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which seemed to be cursed from the very start of production, and whose trainwreck of a publicity tour reached a zenith during the last few weeks before its premiere at Venice. But Styles is also a co-lead in Michael Grandage’s My Policeman, a very traditional kind of English blissful-romance-and-disastrous-aftermath that’s different enough to be interesting but formulaic enough to be reasonably safe for your parents to watch at some point when it inevitably catches some award buzz. It’s all a very mild affair, directed with some amount of glossy precision by Grandage, who seems keenly aware that this is a prestige piece for Amazon, but it’s well-acted by Styles and his co-leads, who seem to be perfectly chosen to ac-cent-tchu-ate his positives and e-lim-in-ate his negatives as he makes his way from bit parts to lead roles.
If you’ve ever read an Ian McEwen novel, My Policeman will seem particularly familiar: Bethan Roberts’ novel owes a great debt to works like Atonement and On Chesil Beach, which unsurprisingly made for pretty good film adaptations themselves. It’s split between time periods: in the ’90s, a married couple, Tom (Linus Roache) and Marion (Gina McKee), welcome in Patrick (Rupert Everett), an old and estranged friend who has recently suffered a debilitating stroke, to their seaside abode so that he might recover in a calm and friendly setting. This decision has driven a wedge between Tom and Marion, the passion having left their relationship a long time ago, and Marion assumes sole responsibility for their charge, with Tom refusing even to see him. When Patrick’s effects arrive from the hospital, she discovers an aged diary that he used to keep back in their glory days, when they were young and attractive and interesting. See, Patrick (David Dawson) used to be a museum curator in the ’50s, taking care of the Turners and other artworks in Brighton’s art museum, and a chance encounter with a policeman one afternoon would permanently alter all three of their lives. Tom (Styles) was that policeman: a kindly chap who didn’t fit into Patrick’s ideas about the coppers, who seemed both interested in Patrick’s life and career and not to share the prejudices that his fellow officers did. Patrick offers to draw him, the pair get boisterously drunk, and one thing leads to another. Tom’s slightly ashamed of himself and flees but keeps returning to his spacious and well-adorned flat, enamored with the curator.
At this point in the UK, homosexuality was still criminalized, and Patrick’s day-to-day life is always under threat from the watchful eyes of the law, who could put a stop to everything if he were unlucky enough to be caught. It’s around this time that Tom meets Marion (Emma Corrin) at the beach and then again at a local swimming pool and impresses her with his graceful manner and willingness to improve himself. He trades her swimming lessons for book recommendations and invites her to meet Patrick at the museum one day for a private guided tour. Marion’s attracted to Patrick, as well, but her eyes are set on Tom, with her being totally unaware that the pair of them are conducting an affair. It’s around that time that Tom realizes he needs to get married to advance up the ranks of the force, and their union – for which Patrick will become a frustrating third wheel for Marion – acts as a cover for the pair of them. Now, my little synopsis here orients Patrick as the main character, and he often is in the flashbacks, given that they’re written from his perspective, but Marion is our point-of-view character. We witness the entire history of her and Tom (up to a certain point, that is) from her eyes before we ever find out the truth, and it goes a long way towards making a relatively straightforward romantic drama into something just a little more interesting, even if Grandage and Roberts play coy with some of the details that she (but not the viewer) already knows about.
Outside of the temporal and perspective hijinks, My Policeman is a pretty stately drama about love and discrimination against some of its forms, with period Brighton rendered with vivid tenderness. The older cast members do solid, if unremarkable, work (there’s little continuity in the performances between the older and younger, but it’s passable enough not to be distracting), but the younger trio makes everything so much better than it needs to be. At this point in his career, Styles has a somewhat limited range: He’s somewhat blank, yet affably so, and a role like the one he’s in here – a closeted policeman, forced into a relationship with a girl he genuinely likes but kept away from the person with whom one could fairly call his soulmate – is a remarkably good fit. He’s charming yet perpetually uncomfortable, keen to act quietly stable, and loving while Corrin and Dawson do the emotional heavy lifting. He is, after all, the only character whose point of view we don’t have access to, and him being a beautiful cipher has a thematic and narrative function.
What flashes of dynamism we see here are interesting, and another take on this project might have pushed him in more challenging ways, but it’s definitely good work on his part. There are always awkward transitional moments when someone famous and successful in one artform makes moves towards another, but it seems Styles has a decent enough idea of what his on-screen persona should be – a fusion of Laurence Harvey’s stoicism with the visual presence of a young and serious Hugh Grant – and a willingness to subvert the kind of masculine ideals that those comparisons imply.