Here’s a tantalising portrait of Roald Dahl’s marriage to salty Hollywood star Patricia Neal, which details how catastrophic events (including the loss of the couple’s seven year daughter, Olivia, in 1962) bled into Dahl’s writing of the children’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Neal’s gloriously defiant performance in Hud.
Hugh Bonneville (Dahl) and Keeley Hawes (Neal) are extremely watchable. They’re heavily hampered, however, by a whimsical script that often feels like propaganda for the problematic Dahl brand (last year his family quietly published a statement apologising for the ‘lasting and understandable hurt’ caused by his anti-semitism).
Director/co-writer John Hay creates a superfluous phantom, Dahl’s sweet, schoolboy self, who hangs out in the writer’s shed, sucking a lollipop. Exit ghost? Alas, no. This one takes ages to bugger off.
Talking of Dahl’s early years, there’s no mention of the fact that Dahl’s own sister died when she was 7 and that, when she did so, his father lost the will to live. How could anyone exploring the impact of Olivia’s death not see that as relevant?
While acknowledging that a grief-stricken and often sozzled Dahl was tough on his sensitive second-born, Tessa (Isabella Jonsson; excellent), the film insists that by the time Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published the little girl’s life was peachy. Tessa Dahl’s 2012 memoir suggests otherwise; she describes being medicated into submission from childhood to adolescence.
The film also gives the impression that what didn’t kill Dahl and Neal’s marriage made it stronger. Hmm. We’re told that, pre-Charlie..., foolish adults didn’t get the “twisted” Dahl and wanted him to be more like Enid Blyton. It’s ironic, then, that Hay has Blyton-ed the hell out of a story which could and should have been a dark gem.
99 mins, cert PG. Sky Cinema
