This might be John Boorman’s last film; disappointing enough to his long-time fans. But it’s also disappointing that Queen and Country is such a flabby affair, lacking in punch, lacking in believability and in no way a satisfying conclusion to either Boorman’s career, or to its prequel; the 1987 classic Hope and Glory
We last saw Boorman’s autobiographical central character Bill as a small schoolboy, rejoicing with his friends as a stray bomb hits his school ‘Thank you Adolph!’ Ten years on and Bill (Callum Turner) is facing the Korean War as an immature and inexperienced National Serviceman (a veritable virgin soldier). Britain is only just beginning to throw off the privations of wartime, and the younger generation is beginning to flex its opinions on an older, exhausted, and none the wiser generation.
Bill’s friend Percy (played by the American Caleb Landry Jones with an excruciating English accent and plenty of bothersome tics) is a tinderbox, primed to explode by Sergeant Major Bradley (David Thewlis); who goads him on with his adherence to inane army regulations, although the few instances we see of this are completely unconvincing. Are these boys really so immature that they are bent completely out of shape with barely any provocation? What on earth do they think the army is? Butlins?
Into this brew Bill is suffering the pangs of unrequited love for the hopelessly wooden upper-class Ophelia, while Bill’s genial warm family, happily living on the idyllic Pharaoh’s Island, appear and disappear (with some worryingly near-incestuous scenes between Bill and his sister).
It’s a likeable film, but not likeable enough. It has all the right ingredients; the 1950s, coming of age, a saucy subplot and Pharaoh’s Island which is the knockout star of this piece. It’s well observed and marinated in sense of period. It looks ravishing.
It also has some wonderful scenes with Bill and Percy, who having failed to make the grade as soldiers are not sent to Korea but are sent, quite arbitrarily, to the typing pool instead where they teach the other failures to bash out lewd jokes and phrases at sixty words per minute. There are poignant moments of autobiography, as Bill, his interest in film burgeoning, goes to see Kurosawa’s film Rashomon.
But the storytelling isn’t tight enough, the script isn’t as sharp or as funny as it could be, and that isn’t simply because Boorman is from an older generation of film makers with a different sense of editing and pace since Hope and Glory is a wonderfully controlled and frequently comic piece of film-making. It is partly to do with the final polish that the script is still badly in need of. It is also because this is neither fish nor fowl; it isn’t adequately balanced as either a love story or as an examination of a young man on the cusp of adulthood.
The same era and the same themes were examined by the poet P J Kavanagh in his autobiography The Perfect Stranger which, like Queen and Country, is a bittersweet memorial to adolescence, post war Britain, national service and its exasperating officers, and Korea. But Kavanagh’s gentle tale has a clear sense of what it is; a memorial and love story to a younger self, and is beautifully told. Boorman’s film reaches for the same material but doesn’t grasp it firmly enough, leaving it tattered.
Now if only Boorman had taken Kavanagh’s book and translated it for the screen. What a film that might have been.