Upon their first meeting, Patrick (David Dawson) encourages Tom (Harry Styles) to take his perspective on art seriously. “Taste is just knowing how something makes you feel,” he gently implores. It’s a thoughtful line and a compelling framework to understand wanting and the ways in which it can shape and misshape us, but the film’s simplistic understanding of desire ultimately can’t bear the weight of such a hefty idea.
My Policeman charts the tragic love affair between a policeman and art collector in 1950s Brighton. They fall in love before suddenly ending their relationship after Tom’s wife, the desperate Marion (Emma Corrin and later Gina McKee), interferes. Director Michael Grandage switches between the ‘90s and ‘50s, with Rupert Everett playing an older version of Patrick and Linus Roache an older version of Tom, carefully casting a sense of futility on their unnecessary heartbreak in the process. Employing flashbacks is a simple, cinematic way of charting meaningful, human consequences. There is a certain power in the final shot of Patrick and Tom clutching one another, the history of their relationship floating above the intertwined figures, but any critical analysis of the interactions from the ‘90s belies an incomplete story. Too many questions crowd this version of the plot, all suggesting that nothing has happened in the 40-year interim, grinding this story, and the film as a whole, to a halt.
What should be a tight, passionate story of love leaks into something deflated and absent of real connection. Flashbacks are shoddily squeezed in, edited in with techniques so familiar to film-going audiences, they are cliché. Marion picks up Patrick’s diary before a voice over signifies a shift in narrative, she looks forlornly out the window and watches Tom walk the dog while shots of a younger Tom wandering the beach are interspersed. Almost every attempt to interrogate memory feels wrote and blandly predictable. Yet there are moments of thrilling adeptness, showcasing the emotionally prescient film that could have been. In one sequence, Grandage chooses to have Patrick and Tom’s conversation play softly in the background of a voiceover recounting their first meeting. It feels emotionally honest, true to the way we glaze over details while hanging on to images.
Really My Policeman struggles to justify the decision to have an older Patrick remain silent in his old age. David Dawson and Rupert Everett are well-matched, both armed with a deflective self-awareness. In the moments when older Patrick is granted some respite, Everett’s wryness feels familiar, reminiscent of Dawson’s sparkling smile and charming asides. But really the older Patrick is confined to his room, bound to a wheelchair after suffering from a stroke. He is cruelly reduced to his younger voice, unable to reflect meaningfully on how he has been punished over the course of his life. Maybe this is an accurate fate, the necessary conclusion, but there is a bitter harshness which tinges all of Marion and Tom’s conversations as a result. Together they reach conclusions, discuss their marriage, discuss Tom’s sexuality, all within earshot of a bedbound Patrick. His silence feels stark, almost incidental, like his character was forgotten when scripting these scenes, cast to the dinginess of the spare room.
In many ways the plot of the film is rooted in the art gallery, where Patrick teaches Marion and Tom about art. He encourages them to interact with paintings in a fundamentally emotional way, to work past the urge to be an observer and instead to be participants in the action of what they see. Yet My Policeman is guilty of creating a visual landscape devoid of anything truly captivating. The teacher’s lounge where Marion works is inexplicably huge, Patrick’s apartment is tall and looming, every staircase is gloomily similar; dead space gnaws at every frame of the film. All of this is indicative of a movie uninterested in the texture of these characters’ worlds, in layering the shades of their intertwined lives.
Much has been made of Harry Styles’ questionable acting, but alongside the captivating David Dawson he is passable. Indeed, Dawson’s physical assurance lends the film a much-needed levity and elevates every other actor in the film. Corrin is burdened with an unenviable role; they must respond to every plot development with disdain or ignorance and do so with a convincing ease. Unsurprisingly, they come out of the film without having made an impression.
There is a moral ambiguity simmering beneath the surface of My Policeman, but instead of tapping into this potent energy, Grandage lets the film sink into visual blandness. Dawson’s performance belongs to a more interesting film, one which endeavours to understand the difference between feeling and memory and what living in these imagined realities offers and demands.
