Social change has come to 1920s Littlehampton in the person of Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a foul-mouthed pub-roisterer of an Irish immigrant to this sleepy little English town. More specifically, her unconventional choices, including raising her daughter on her own and living with a man (Malachi Kirby) to whom she is not married, predictably raise eyebrows among the townsfolk, and the hackles of Edward Swan, the paterfamilias of the home that shares a very thin wall (and a loo) with Rose. So, when a series of profanity-laced, anatomically specific letters begin arriving addressed to Edith (Olivia Colman), the only one of 11 children still living at home, suspicion naturally falls on the scraggly-haired neighbor with the outsized personality.
It is with the arrival of the 19th missive that WICKED LITTLE LETTERS, a sly comedy of (bad) manners and female liberation begins. Based on, as they say, actual events, it recounts a battle of the sexes played out against a post-WWI era, when women were expected to give up the freedom that they had found doing men’s work during the war and return to being “decent”. In one corner, the Swan paterfamilias (Timothy Spall), the embodiment of all that was wrong with the Empire, aghast at the prospect of female suffrage and apoplectic as the idea that any woman, especially his wife (Gemma Jones) or daughter, might have an opinion. In the other, Rose, a good-hearted rogue defiantly delighted with her life even as she struggles to make sure her daughter (Alisha Weir) grows up to be a queen. In between are the townsfolk. The policemen (Paul Chahidi, Hugh Skinner) who bumble their condescending way through the day bluffing one another about their expertise and minimizing the one woman on the force (Anjana Vasan), the real brains of the operation who longs for more than just the token work assigned to her. The bridge club (Eileen Atkins, Lolly Adefope, Joanna Scanlon), of sharp, independent women who are sure Rose didn’t do it, but at a loss to prove it. For the moment.
What ensues is a wry battle of wits rendered unfair not only because of the social position men hold, but also by the way the women use that very caste system (and their low place in it) to their advantage by playing on male expectations. Not that it’s easy. Constantly remined to remember their place, these women have obstacles modern women can scarcely imagine, which makes then all the more infuriating. And Rose’s f-you attitude all the more rousing. The cultural programming at work is made profoundly manifest over and over, with no more damning moment that when Edith’s mother, a silent woman haunting her home, is asked what she thinks and stares blankly at her interlocutor with no frame of reference with which to frame an answer.
Yet, in an odd twist, Edith, who flutters into near swoons over the letters addressed to her, also finds a thrilling fulfillment in her new-found celebrity as the focus of a scandal that has reached the halls of Parliament. She basks in what she terms the waves of love washing over her and opines that her suffering brings her closer to heaven (an idea dismissed with extreme prejudice by her father).
Coleman is mesmerizing and hilarious, pitting Edith’s repression against the unfamiliar, and unfamiliarly joyous, inklings of a life outside of the strictly proscribed limits set by her father. She is a child-woman who has never been allowed to grow up discovering that she resents it, and taking those first stumbling steps into adulthood, while still trying to remain in her father’s good-graces. The giddiness insinuates itself into her very body language with a high-pitched, ahem, hysteria, that is grotesquely fascinating and the pitch-perfect blend of low comedy and high drama.
There is something refreshing in a group of women finding their liberation, and their voices, with a mouthful of curses. Swearing has never been more life affirming than when Atkins, with a straight face and a tone of conviction, indulges in some four-letter words with a power of someone who has been waiting her whole life to let fly with a string of well-considered curses. That she does it on a public conveyance makes it a moment that signals the end of the old order, even if the old order will take a long, long time to realize it.
Pointed, clever, and best of all filled with righteous outrage, WICKED LITTLE LETTERS crackles with an energy that belies its dead-pan execution. It’s a paean to the first feminists, a reminder that multiculturalism isn’t new, and a tribute to getting one over on their oppressors.
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