The Laureate film review: If you miss Downton Abbey, try this
The Laureate film review and star rating: ★★★
The lives of writers don’t always make interesting viewing, but the private side of our favourite authors always seem to find their way to the screen. The Laureate centres on poet Robert Graves (Tom Hughes), famous for his writing about his experiences during World War I. The film sees him in the throws of PTSD and unable to work, until he finds kinship with American writer Laura Riding (Dianna Agron). Riding moves in with Graves and his wife Nancy (Laura Haddock), leading to an unusual living arrangement that inspires and derails all involved.
Director William Nunez films and paces the movie like a haunted house mystery. Bathed in candlelight, the ghosts that haunt this idyllic country pile symbolise the trauma that follows Graves nightly. The plot becomes focused on the domestic situation, with plenty of lingering looks of desire between the cast as they exchange loaded lines of poetry. This provides some frisson of tension for audiences, but the chance to look at the effect war can have on a creative mind is not taken, which seems like a waste.
Agron has the most interesting performance, effectively floating between saviour and manipulator. She has great chemistry with Haddock’s Nancy, who plays a woman awoken to a different way of living after years of being a support system. Hughes doesn’t have as much room to develop, looking stricken as he has flashbacks to his past that sadly aren’t elaborated on.
There are plenty of handsomely mounted dramas about troubled writers, and The Laureate sits comfortably among them without doing anything vastly different. If you miss the Sunday night melodrama of Downton, it’s a racy tale of entanglement that will occupy the void.
The Laureate is in cinemas from 5th May
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