The Ballad of Wallis Island

 Saw The Ballad of Wallis Island. It's an odd film. I wanted to like it more than I did, and the film really wants you to like it. It's coasting on Tim Key's eye-popping charm, his burped out odd comments, his double and triple takes, his peculiar ability make you feel sad by slightly widening his eyes. He's the reason this film isn't a gentle will-they won't-they musical comedy. He's a mad Prospero trapped on an island, commanding his creatures. They bend to his will. 

The broad strokes plot sees folk musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) tricked into doing a gig on Wallis island for a fee of half a million pounds. There's no harbour and he falls into the water getting out of the boat, meaning his phone doesn't work. This means he carries a plastic bag full of twenty pence pieces for the rest of the film, so he can use the single pay-phone on the island. The single shop on the island had an impressive float to be able to change his fifty. That's 250 twenty pence pieces in the till! 

There's also a bit of business with a bag of rice that doesn't really go anywhere. 

Herb was a folk singer, but he's betrayed his folk roots and is now making pop records with people with hip hop names. This is seen as inherently bad in the film. It also makes very little sense. If the notion is that he's sold out his early, worthy authenticity for a lick of Mammon's pop cock, why doesn't he have any money? The half million he's getting from the wizard Charles seems to be his only way of funding his next album. 

Charles reveals a number of things to Herb, slowly: the gig is just for Charles, no one else is coming. It's a tribute to his late wife who was a massive McGwyer Mortimer fan, and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), the other half of the band, is on her way to the island as well, with her new husband. 

The husband, a keen ornithologist, conveniently disappears, he's off to the other side of the island to stare at puffins, leaving the old flame to spark between Nell and Herb, while Charles looks on, rubbing his hands and licking his lips, part matchmaker, part manipulator. 

For a while they get on great, then Herb makes a move, is rebuffed, and Nell fucks off. Her husband comes back, tells Herb off, and Herb is left to consider what a loser he is. But, here's the thing, he's been hanging round with magic widower Charles, playing tennis and doing bad puns, and he's seen how much Charles loves his old music, how much it means to him, and how it's wrapped up in his relationship with his late wife. 

So he does the gig, and a bit of matchmaking of his own, and soon Charles is fixed up with the only other person in the film, the nice shopkeeper. Herb leaves, cooler, wiser, and determined to junk his shit new direction. He doesn't even take Charles' money, because the quirky, grief-stricken oddball has paid him in wonder. It's a lot like at the end of David Brent: Life on the Road, where the cool sound engineer, also played by Tom Basden, spends his fee on some fake snow, and buys David a pint, because somehow he likes him now. 

This is a film about magic. And the magic is Tim Key's appearance on film. His acting style is naturalistic to the point of stalling the film, bringing it to a shuddering halt. He peers out into the auditorium, he reacts, he gawps, he ejaculates some odd phrase, and, suddenly, he's back in the weft of the narrative, dodging between realities, not fully in the world of the story or our world. He's a pixie, Puck in a peaked cap, an unshaven Tinkerbelle. Look at him in, say, See How They Run, and notice how he doesn't belong there. Nothing he says is right or appropriate, his look signals surprise or mild fright. It's as if, a second before, he was brushing his teeth in his bathroom, staring at his weary face in the medicine cabinet mirror, and now he's police inspector in the 1950s. Perhaps he doesn't understand his arcane powers. But without him this would be a middle-aged romance featuring the absolutely fine songs of Tom Basden. With him, it's a sort of Fairy Tale. 

Charles won the lottery twice, and we're supposed to believe he's not a magic man? Come on.