Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend share a May-December love
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont wants too much to be the cult classic Harold and Maude, though director Dan Ireland tries to politely “Brit-ify” it. Ireland’s new film is based on a British novel published the same year Harold and Maude opened in U.S. cinemas, and the book and both films revolve around the relationship between a twentysomething man and a 70-something woman. In the screen version of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Ireland tacks the romance between Harold and Maude onto the satirical despondence of the late Elizabeth Taylor’s novel. The result is an exhausting melodrama, one half farce and the other overwrought sentimentality. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a grandson’s apology letter for neglecting his grandmother — with a P.S. acknowledging his latent sexual feelings for her.
The aging Mrs. Palfrey (Joan Plowright) waits for her grandson to visit as she lives out her last days in a residential hotel in London. One day, while out walking, she trips on the sidewalk and is rescued by Ludo, a young writer whom she convinces to impersonate her grandson in order to save face at the Claremont. From their first meeting, where Ludo lifts Mrs. Palfrey’s skirt over her wrinkled and liver-spotted knee and blows on her wound coquettishly, Ireland slips into melodrama and simultaneously begins a puzzling romantic subtext that is never fully explained or resolved.
Harold and Maude’s relationship worked on the opposites-attract premise, contrasting Maude’s vivacity against Harold’s death fixation. Taylor’s novel succeeded because of Mrs. Palfrey’s one-sided attraction to her young friend, in contrast to the detached curiosity with which he observes her. In Ireland’s film, however, the two-sided romantic subtext is spotty and unsupported, with Ludo’s overt flirtations towards Mrs. Palfrey unfounded. The crisscross between their familial relationship and their suggested romantic interest is confusing rather than intriguing.
Compounding their undefined relationship is the imbalanced depiction of their personalities, seen only through each other’s eyes, bereft of an outside perspective. Like a series of doting, congratulatory letters, the dialogue between Mrs. Palfrey and Ludo is ingratiating. Surrounded by a collection of loathsome creatures and caricatures, they seem like two angels trapped in purgatory. Mrs. Palfrey’s memories of her late husband are idyllic and one-dimensional, and only when she’s spurned by Ludo does she express anything besides acceptance and bemusement. Ludo, similarly, plays a polite and considerate man who does no wrong, which contradicts the fact the two women from his past, a scorned girlfriend and a bitter mother, want nothing to do with him.
Plowright’s performance is solid and spot-on, living up to her title as Lady Lawrence Olivier and her reputation on the British stage, and she does her best to deliver her lines stalwartly, even when forced to explain that her memories “Live in here (as she taps her head) and here (as she taps her heart).” The script occasionally shows more insight, but its subtly is marred by clichéd transition music torn from British weekly serials. Transcribed straight from the novel, but without Taylor’s astute observations to frame them, the bon mots descend into easy satire, sounding hollow and out of place in surroundings that don’t deserve their gravitas.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont fails to live up to the ingenuity of its source material. Without the dry wit of Taylor’s novel, it becomes a film of overblown sentiment. Without the vivacity and quirkiness of Harold and Maude, it is only a saccharine apology note, written to a grandmother already gone, about guilty intentions best left unmentioned.
