‘Wicked Little Letters’ Review: Foxy Ass Fun That Doesn’t Go Quite Far Enough

Few people in the movies curse quite as effectively as Olivia Colman, and casting her as the demure rival to an out-spoken, potty mouthed neighbor is a pledge to the audience that her character will go off on an expletive-ridden rant the second she’s pushed too far. The promise of fruity language has been surprisingly central in the UK marketing campaign for Wicked Little Letters, a based-on-a-true-story romp adapted from the Littlehampton Letters scandal that rocked a sleepy English seaside town in the 1920s. Perhaps this is because Brits are still falsely stereotyped as a repressed nation, and a movie and press tour which celebrates the magic of dropping F-and-C bombs – the latter of which Colman gleefully told a red carpet interviewer was her favorite word, in an immediately viral clip – is an invitation to let off some steam.

After all, the film argues, keeping everything bottled up could leave you as unhappy as protagonist Edith Swan (Colman), who is middle-aged, unmarried, and effectively left behind from the advancement of women’s rights throughout this era, stuck under the roof of a cruel, overbearing, and casually misogynistic father (Timothy Spall). Not so subtle is the suggestion that her deep-rooted anger towards Rose Gooding (Buckley) is due to her free-spiritedness; she’s managed to conform to society’s expectations of women as a mother and homemaker, all while being as loud and loose as the men surrounding her. That envy was already bubbling up long before she started receiving insulting letters in the mail, all anonymous, but written with such a fondness for the least child-friendly terms in the English language, that the only possible culprit could be Rose. It’s treated by the police as an open-and-shut case, but via the way the letters force Edith to confront repressed feelings, it soon becomes clear that it’s anything but.

The mixed reaction to director Thea Sharrock’s film since its TIFF premiere last September is largely because of the fixation on the swearing itself; there have been multiple complaints that, while the initial letter is funny due to its foul-mouthed frankness, the film relies too much on cursing as a cheap way to bring in laughs. Naturally, these dwindle the more the film repeats this formula, even if it is building up to a well-earned tirade from its lead actress, getting a chance to bellow her favorite word. It ensures the film is flawed, but I can’t help but feel it’s been largely written off due to this alone, when a far more interesting examination of this period – and its many parallels with our own – is taking place around it, its richness overshadowed by a comedic conceit that wears itself into the ground. It’s not that the film is particularly subtle in how it grounds itself into its specific period, with several character conversations returning to the subject of the Suffragette marches, or the belittling the town’s first female police officer (Anjana Vasan, from Peacock’s underrated We Are Lady Parts) receives from male colleagues who are comparatively terrible at their jobs. But these splashy moments, in which comedian-turned-screenwriter Jonny Sweet clearly lays out the story’s message of female empowerment, are just the surface. There’s more going on beneath this deceptively slight comedy-drama than is first apparent.

Take the character of Rose, played by Buckley with a gleeful coarseness that is entirely incidental; she’s a richer figure than anybody else within the drama would care to identify her as. But the biggest source of intrigue within this period is also the one left deliberately unspoken – she’s an immigrant within a conservative English town, which puts a mark on her back within a close-knit community that looks towards any outsiders with skepticism. This doesn’t manifest itself in outright prejudice, so much as it fosters a lingering sense of microaggressions, whispered conversations about the woman who is raising a child out of wedlock, is married to a man other than her father who is completely out of the picture, and spends her evenings drinking with other men.

It can easily be interpreted as an analogue for the kind of hysterical character assassination you can regularly see in the tabloids or on social media, one of the earliest case studies for how people can become “main characters” when we never observe the intimate details of their lives, just a broad series of characteristics presented without deeper context. The thing which makes this work is that – mercifully – Sweet’s screenplay never once tries to tie this into an ill-advised commentary on “cancel culture,” aiming for a broader takedown of the human impulse to chase gossip and scandal, making people into villains for the sake of an easy story. Yes, you could easily argue this has parallels with the modern day, but it’s to the credit of the film that it never actively chases this relevance. The message will still resonate, and perhaps even resonate more, once we stop indulging those who declare they’re being “cancelled” because they’ve received the mildest criticism, all of which just rubs salt in the wound of the many voiceless figures who are suffering from censorship.

The big problem with the film is that it doesn’t have the same depth when linking this to the way other characters are treated – Gladys Moss, for example, is the first female police officer in the region’s history, and we only ever see her undermined by other men for taking on a job they believe to be exclusively for the boys. The real Gladys Moss was white, so the casting of Vasan, an actress of Tamil heritage, could have been an intriguing way to outline the suspicious ways the predominantly white townsfolk looked at anybody they declared outsiders. Unfortunately, her arc is merely supplementary to those of Rose and Edith, serving as a mirror in terms of experiences with little else to expand on, suggesting the filmmakers didn’t want to get their hands dirty by tackling a topic that older, white British cinema goers would find too uncomfortable. I could buy the argument that it would feel ill-suited within a film unambiguously straining to become a crowd pleasing hit, but it feels more awkward to pointedly transform this character only to be so toothless as to not say anything.

Wicked Little Letters has more food-for-thought than it might look like from the outside – and is also a more frustrating viewing experience too. It doesn’t deserve to be written off as a frothy comedy where Jessie Buckley hurls curse words at Olivia Colman, but I was left wishing the filmmakers would have grappled with the full, weighty potential of this material.

Rating: B-

Sony Pictures Classics will release Wicked Little Letters in theaters in Los Angeles and New York on March 29 and nationwide on April 5.

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Alistair Ryder

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