Mrs. Henderson Presents: Judi Dench Coasts on “Cute”
There’s no denying that Judi Dench is a great actress. She may not have deserved her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her few minutes on screen as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, but we all know she won that because Academy voters felt guilty about not giving her the Oscar she deserved the previous year for Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown. She’s great. However, when she’s allowed to get away with playing a charming/cantankerous upper-class British elf, she does. Goodness knows she’s earned the right, and she’s still enjoyable even when she’s on autopilot. Still, if the Dench-moxie is all a movie has going for it, it’s not going to work.
Thus, Mrs. Henderson presents . . . not much interesting. It’s the tale of a rich British widow who, on a whim, buys a theater and hires an artistic director with whom she charmingly spars (and, apparently, loves?) for the rest of the movie. But—gasp!—this darling old bird suggests that the theater gain novelty status by featuring topless girls in its shows. My, my, she’s cute and naughty. Cue tittering here.
About halfway through, we stop with the twee and turn to the melodramatic, as World War II begins, and the nude musical revue bravely soldiers on through the Blitz. By the end of the film, we learn what we’ve already sort of guessed, that Mrs. Henderson has an entirely noble motive for exploiting naked young women: her son died in the First World War, and, afterward, as she was going through his things, she discovered a nude postcard among them. She realized that he had probably never seen a naked woman in real life. So, brave Doughboy lads, it’s all for you: thanks to Mrs. Henderson, you can see some live bosoms before you’re blown to bits! How touching.
If you’re expecting any sort of meaningful meditation on the ethics of nudity in art, you won’t find it here. According to the British government, the show is okay as long as the girls remain motionless—because that’s more like the nudity you’d see in great works of art in a museum. I have friends both in the fine arts and the theater who have wrestled with the ethics of nudity in their fields (particularly from a faith perspective), and there’s nothing here to help in weighing the issue. According to Mrs. Henderson, what did God give women these parts for, if not to show them off?
I’ve heard several people describe Mrs. Henderson Presents as “The Full Monty, only with women”—which it decidedly is not. For the record, The Full Monty is one of my favorite movies, so this is hardly an unbiased view, but one of the things that’s so great about that movie is that it’s not about the nudity. It’s about a lot of things: working-class industrial Britain, men and their body image, male bonding, how various characters deal with failure. And it has an alternately hilarious and poignant script. Mrs. Henderson Presents is about, well, Judi Dench acting cute.
One of the most puzzling things about the movie is that it’s directed by Stephen Frears, who recently guided Helen Mirren to near-goddess status this past awards season for The Queen. Mirren’s performance in The Queen is everything that’s lacking in Judi Dench’s performance in Mrs. Henderson Presents. As you’re watching, you don’t think, “Wow, that Helen Mirren is doing an amazing job”; you forget about Helen Mirren herself, because she melts so completely into the role. She never steps outside it for a knowing wink at the audience. Part of this may just be the difference between the two actresses, but, as I’ve said before, Dench can still pull off a great, unself-conscious performance: from what I’ve heard, she does so in last year’s Notes on a Scandal.
So does the problem lie in Frears’s direction? Maybe in part, but he did such a fabulous job with The Queen that I’m not willing to lay all the blame at his feet. He’s directed a wide variety of films in his career, some of them much better than others. I think one of Frears’s own comments may be important in understanding why his movies are of such varying quality: “I can’t write,” he says. “I don’t think I’m even particularly good at telling a writer what’s good or what’s missing. So, actually having someone who can do that is a godsend.” I don’t think God sent him a very good screenwriter for Mrs. Henderson Presents, whereas The Queen’s writer Peter Morgan seems to be one of the best working today. After all, the (screen)play’s the thing . . .
3 comments June 30th, 2007