Helen Mirren is Dorothy and Jim Broadbent is Kempton in The Duke (he’s in between)
In The Duke, a pair of Oscar-winning stars, Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, do some of their slyest, most engaging work. The story, based on actual events, at first seems like a fairly standard British working-class comedy, but sweet/sad undertones find their way in, and an autumnal spell lifts the whole enterprise. The movie was made in 2019 and premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, but COVID and other delays kept it from being released in the UK and the U.S. until now.
Broadbent has the showier role. Kempton Bunton is a 61-year-old regular bloke in Newcastle, working part-time but nearing retirement – and still hoping to achieve late life success as a playwright. We first meet him standing trial at the Old Bailey for stealing Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington (ca. 1812) from the National Gallery. Picturing himself to the sympathetic courtroom crowd as a comically unlikely art thief, he jocularly pleads not guilty, delighting the spectators and bringing a stern rebuke from the judge (James Wilby).
The next scene is set six months earlier, and we begin to learn how Kempton got into this fix. Fired from his job as a taxi driver, he’s idling about the house working on his latest play. His long-suffering wife Dorothy (Mirren), who works as a housekeeper to maintain the household’s shaky finances, reads the manuscript and discovers it’s about their late daughter, killed in a bicycle accident at age 18. The loss torments Dorothy, who still can’t bear to visit the gravesite. She regards her husband’s willingness to turn the family tragedy into a money-making play as a betrayal.
Here’s where The Duke begins to take on richer colors. Mirren forms a counterforce to Broadbent’s harebrained fecklessness. What’s admirable about her here is that she carefully makes Dorothy the minor player in the family drama, left mostly to carp at Kempton for his laziness and dreaminess, and to scrub fireplaces in rich people’s houses to keep food on the table. But Mirren, in making Dorothy appear slight – her movements are guarded, hands kept close to her body, and she rarely holds eye contact – transforms her grief and grievances into something larger.
Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent are the Buntons at home in The Duke
Much patience is required from her. Kempton loudly favors leftwing political causes. Lately he’s started a campaign to grant TV licenses, which in 1961 were required in order to watch the BBC, to Britain’s elder population. With the Goya painting in hand, he sends anonymous ransom notes to the government saying he’ll return the painting if its evaluated worth of 140,000 Pounds will go to providing TV licenses and much needed welfare to the elderly.
What Kempton doesn’t grasp, and Dorothy eventually realizes, is that his entire family is being corrupted by this absurd, if well-meaning, scheme. He’s instructed their younger son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead) to help hide the painting upstairs in the back of a wardrobe. Complicit in a crime, Jackie wonders what will become of his dream to be a shipbuilder in California or Australia. The elder son Kenny (Jack Bandeira), a part-time low-level criminal, pays a visit with his girlfriend Pammy (Charlotte Spencer). She accidentally discovers the hidden painting and demands half of the 10,000-pound reward the government is offering for its secret return.
Dorothy finally learns that Kempton has the painting. Her repressed fury is unleashed. Mirren takes on a steely grace in her rage, and the movie turns into a vivid two-person contest. The plain decency and good sense of Dorothy is set against the absurd idealism of the dreamer Kempton. When he’s found out and goes on trial, she declares herself fed up with his flagrant trickery.
It's a sobering turn in what has seemed mostly a romp, and the director, Roger Michell (who sadly passed away in 2021), subtly but surely darkens the tone, making the family’s future worryingly uncertain. It turns out that the adroit screenplay from Richard Bean and Clive Coleman holds more bluffs than we can see coming. To our surprise, melancholy has become one of them. And we don’t know what else we don’t know until the very end.
Matthew Goode is the suave, sympathetic defense barrister in The Duke
The game cast, which includes an unexpectedly chivalrous upper class defense barrister (Matthew Goode) and Wilby’s surprisingly insightful judge, knows how to get laughs and keep their professional cool at the same time. No character is overplayed, all gingerly set the script’s quiet traps. Nothing interrupts the flow. The cinematography by Mike Eley is appropriately muted, with intermittent jolts of English pop ’60s radiance, and clever uses of split screens, which ratchets up the sense of connivances afoot.
The treasures here are Broadbent and Mirren, both in top form. Broadbent has always been clever in playing hearty, well-meaning eccentrics without a whiff of condescension. He did so commandingly in his Oscar turn as the brilliant, shambling critic John Bayley in Iris (2001). You can see him do the same thing with icy elegance as a wealthy marked man in the television series London Spy (2015) from the BBC.
Here he makes maladroit Kempton a man of more smarts and less selfishness than he at first appears. The entire British government doesn’t cow him. Every problem has a solution, Kempton avows, but it’s his essential goodness, not his overtaxed brain, that helps him find one here.
Mirren’s Dorothy struck me as rather new for the actress. I’ve never seen her play a woman so beset by circumstances that she seems to be not just hemmed in but deeply wearied by them. Her frustration with Kempton seems to be draining her as we watch, and she clutches desperately at the threads that might restore her faith in her husband. Her doubt is palpable, and Mirren blends anger and resignation to piercing effect.
The Duke finally isn’t about stealing a painting. It’s about looking more closely at, studying perhaps for the first time, what you already have. Appraise that, if you dare.