DEATH AND CHOCOLATE (TO OLIVIA)

 

Hot on the heels of one Sky TV production about an episode in Roald Dahl's life comes a Sky movie about another.

Last Christmas, Sky1 gave us 'Roald and Beatrix: The Tale of The Curious Mouse' with Dawn French, Jessica Stevenson, Rob Brydon and Bill Bailey about an encounter between Dahl as a young boy and his favourite writer Beatrix Potter.

Now Sky Original Movies gives us 'To Olivia' about the devastating impact the death of his eldest daughter had on Dahl's marriage to the Academy Award winning actress Patricia Neal.

Adapted for the screen by director John Hay and David Logan from Neal's memoir 'An Unquiet Life,' it is the kind of movie aimed at audiences who adore Richard Attenborough's CS Lewis tale 'Shadowlands,' Marc Foster's JM Barrie movie 'Finding Neverland' or Chris Noonan's 'Miss Potter'.

It's also the sort of film that you might end up watching on TV on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Hugh Bonneville is cast as Dahl and the prodigious Keeley Hawes as Neal in the film which begins in a gentle fashion with the writer appearing in a village hall to read 'James and the Giant Peach' to some local children.

A plate of peaches sits on the stage which prompts one boy, Bobby O'Neill's Augustus 'Gus' Perkins to help himself, only to be met by the imposing figure of the great writer.

Dahl and Gus immediately hit it off, with the writer asking the boy to give him a peach and then challenging him and the other children to eat the fruit and see if they can throw the stone over their backs and into the plate onstage.

Afterwards, Gus's rather condescending and obnoxious father, Michael Hobson's solicitor Pete Perkins is stunned to see Keeley Hawes' Patricia Neal arrive in the hall.

This prompts Dahl to make a rather tongue in cheek bet with Pete Perkins that he will leave the hall with the movie star that evening which his wife plays along with.

Neal and Dahl bring this sense of mischief not just to their interaction with the locals in the Bedfordshire village they have uprooted to from New York but to their children as well.

When he is not writing or tending to their idyllic garden, Dahl likes to take his eldest child , Darcey Ewart's Olivia to the village confectionery shop and bounce ideas for the book he is writing about a sweet factory.

He also spins a tale to Isabella Jonson's middle child Tessa about fairies in their garden and uses weedkiller to scrawl out a message from the mythical creatures overnight to both girls in the garden.

The couple had previously known tragedy when their four month old son, Theo sustained brain damage after his baby carriage was struck by a taxi in New York.

But they suffer another unbearable loss, with Olivia being rushed to hospital because of encephalitis brought on by a bout of the measles.

When she passed away, the impact is devastating - cruelly exposing the fissures in their marriage.

Roald especially struggles with his grief, packing away Olivia's toys and books immediately after her funeral while mourners linger downstairs in the family home.

Not long afterwards, he snaps at Tessa after she lets some caged songbirds in the garden that Olivia adored to go free.

Patricia tries hard to keep the family functioning in spite of her husband's temper tantrums and bouts of deep depression.

At one stage, while Patricia is out for a morning walk, he leaves Tessa to cook breakfast and retires to bed when a pan sets fire, threatening to burn down the house.

When Patricia gets offered by Conleth Hill's director Martin Ritt the chance to revive her Hollywood career with a part in 'Hud' with Sam Heughan's Paul Newman, things really come to a head and threaten to irrevocably split the marriage 

Hay's movie is a rather lumbering study of grief and its impact on a brittle marriage.

Early on, Dahl alludes to the turbulent affair she had with the married movie star Gary Cooper before they met but which clearly haunts their relationship.

However it is Dahl's insecurity about his writing and his dismissive attitude to her rekindling her film career that proves particularly corrosive.

This is all fascinating material for Hay, Logan, Bonneville and Hawes to work with but the sparks only occasionally fly and the director and his felliw screenwriter just seem to make heavy weather of it.

'To Olivia' never rises above the level of a stodgy TV movie about an episode in Dahl and Neal's marriage and even then, it compares unfavourably with the Emmy nominated 1981 TV movie 'The Patricia Neal Story' with Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde.

Some viewers will be particularly irritated by the way 'To Olicia' manipulates events to suit its own ends.

Rather than getting offered the script after Olivia's death, Neal actually shot 'Hud' in Texas and on Paramount Studios' soundstages months before Olivia's death.

As with other biopics on authors and artists, the script cannot resist being on the nose when it comes to showing the origins of Dahl's literary ideas.

Unfortunately, despite Hawes, Bonneville, Heughan and Hill's best efforts the film just crunches through the gears as it follows the route map of the tortured showbiz biopic, except for two standout moments.

In the first, the late Geoffrey Palmer turns up for one last hurrah as the Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher who the couple go to for comfort in the middle of their grief.

The result is a wonderful piece of comic acting, with Palmer in all his pompous glory as he argues with Dahl and Neal about whether animals are allowed into Heaven.

The second is a scene where Neal rehearses a scene from 'Hud' with Newman in front of Ritt.

Heughan may not look anything like Newman but, boy, does he have his mannerisms down to a tee.

For the duration of the scene, his performance is hypnotic - capturing every tilt of the head, the intense state and the physicality of the screen legend.

Unfortunately, these are bright moments in an otherwise workmanlike tale.

'To Olivia' is no 'Shadowlands'.

It is far from a terrible movie but it is also quite a distance from being a great one.

('To Olivia' was broadcast on Sky Cinema and was made available for streaming on Sky+ and Now TV in the UK and Ireland on February 19, 2021)

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