Film: Topsy-Turvy

Director: Mike Leigh
Genre: Comedy
Source: UK (1999)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Netflix Streaming
Grade: C-

I will have to take a lot of the blame for my reaction to this movie. It's not that it is bad--I have the feeling it is probably actually pretty good. But it was not what I expected, and it was way, way longer than I realized.

Last night at 9:30 Clementine and I wanted to watch a movie, but The Master, which we have on Blu-ray, seemed to be way too long--in the neighborhood of three hours. Somehow we settled on Topsy-Turvy instead, which had a much shorter running time of two hours and forty minutes. By which I mean, about fifty minutes longer than we really had the patience for.

In theory, it's a movie that's right down my alley. It's a bit of a biopic of Victorian British theater legends Gilbert and Sullivan, and it's broken into roughly two halves: in the first hour and twenty minutes it explores their falling out, disagreements, and various reactions to their fame and reputations. The second half deals with Gilbert's inspiration for their famous opera The Mikado and their reuniting over it. The film also touches on the feelings and responses of several of the actors in their company, though only in bits and pieces, which is one of my complaints. We get enough of these fringe characters to see some of their pomposity, or weakness, or whatever, but not enough to make them full-fledged characters. The revelation that one of the actors is a drug addict (30 minutes before the film ends) should have mattered more, but there was no real hint of it beforehand or resolution to it afterword. It was just a thing that happened.

There were lots of other "things that happened" that could have been shortened or skipped over all together, and by the end of the film, rather than being excited to see the production get underway, I was just ready for the whole thing to end. It became tedious and boring. I liked the actors, I liked the idea of the movie . . . I just didn't really care for large stretches of the actual movie. Maybe I'd like it more if I saw it at a different time, when I knew what I was getting into. After all, this film just recently got a Criterion Collection release, so there must be something there. But last night? Nope.

Plus, there was something weird going on with the sound on Netflix that kind of diluted the experience (since it's about an opera, after all--sound should matter). 

Alternate Film Title: "British Gentlemen Are Ridiculous"