Some are born great, some become great, and others have greatness thrust upon them. In that last category is Charlie Price (wide-eyed innocent Joel Edgerton), the 4th generation heir-apparent to his family’s footwear factory and hero of KINKY BOOTS. His is not the greatness of leading a nation, or conquering evil, but rather that of blazing a new trail into hitherto uncharted shoe territory. After 110 years of producing fine men’s oxfords and brogues, the business he’s reluctantly inherited is, under his guidance, about to take a walk on the wild side back into solvency.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joel Edgerton
It’s just after he’s made his move to London with his wannabe posh fiancée, Nicola (Jemima Rooper), where instead of producing shoes, he’ll be producing marketing spiel. His father’s sudden and untimely death brings him back, much to Nicola’s disdain. Once ensconced in his father’s old office, unchanged in the century of the factory’s history, and looking out over the sea of employees, most of which he’s known since he was a kid himself, he finds himself not entirely unhappy to be there. On a fateful business trip to London, though, he discovers two things. One is Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a drag queen, the headliner at her own SoHo club who has trouble finding stiletto heels that won’t break under her weight. The other is a lesson in the modern workings of the throwaway economy, that the shoes his company is producing, as in expensive, but made to last a lifetime, have no future and barely a present in a throwaway. Both are shocking, but the seeds are sown for the new direction he and his company will be going. He just needs a little help focusing.
He gets that help courtesy of Lauren (Sarah-Jane Potts) a feisty and comely employee with more spit and vinegar about her than Charlie, a sweet puppy dog of a man, has ever dreamed of having. She’s the last to get let go by him, who has seen the writing on the wall, but has misread it. She throws his inept but sincere attempts at empathy and apologies back in his face as well nailing him for giving up the company without a fight.
It’s just the psychic whack upside his head that he needs. With Lauren in tow, he finds Lola, proposes a niche business catering to the drag queen market, and, Lola remarking that one is never more than 10 feet from a cross-dresser, their adventure begins.
The film takes a gentle approach to all of this, with subtle comedy that stems from the characters foibles and flaws as they warily interact with each other. There are surprises, such as the factory’s emeritus shoemaker who sees the problem of producing a stiletto that can take the weight of a man as an engineering challenge that he’s raring to tackle. More predictably there’s Don (Nick Frost), the macho-man of the factory who finds himself in a minority when it comes to needling Lola, and Lola herself, who takes it in stride and then runs with it.
As Lola, Ejiofor is intensely feminine for all his muscled arms, but never swishy, instead exuding a poise and self-confidence that brooks no argument about her choice of gender. He’s not just charismatic, he’s luscious. And he’s the perfect foil for Charlie, whom Edgerton makes endearingly earnest, bumbling, and just a molecule short of eptitude. It makes his heart-to-heart with Charlie all the sweeter, as they discover more than shoes in common, but also fathers with tunnel vision about what they expect from their sons, and their telling disappointment in, among other things, their offspring’s respective choices of footwear.
This is a sharp, smart and heart-warming film. Heaven forefend that the more cloying aspects of that last because it is anything but a runny treacle tart. Rather, it’s proffered in the sense that people, when given the choice, will, eventually, listen to the better angels of their nature and treat other people decently, which is not quite the same thing as showing tolerance. It’s much, much better, whether it’s coming to terms with a man who has chosen to celebrate his feminine nature, or a class division that is thrown up because that’s the mind set that’s been in place for four generations, attitudes change, people grow, and no one’s the worse for the journey. KINKY BOOTS is sly in its utter lack of pretension, as it celebrates a world where people can be their own best self and respected because of it, be it sequin-spangled or wing-tipped.
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