Murder Is Easy reviews.
28/12/2023
Murder Is Easy review: BBC’s Christmas Agatha
Christie adaptation is bland and incoherent
‘Rye Lane’ star
David Jonsson tries to assert his authority, but is forced to navigate his way
around a convoluted plot
Nick Hilton
“How can someone murder three people in an
English village without it being noticed?” This simple question is at the heart
of what has made Agatha Christie the world’s most popular novelist. How is it
that England’s green and pleasant land can be so riddled with people willing to
poison, stab and bludgeon their neighbours? It is a premise that has become a
core part – ho ho ho! – of the BBC’s festive programming, which returns this
year with a 1950s spin on Christie’s 1939 novel, Murder Is Easy.
On the train to London, Luke Fitzwilliam (Rye
Lane’s David Jonsson), freshly arrived from Nigeria, encounters a curious old
lady, Lavinia Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton). “I have to report,” she tells the
young civil servant, ominously, “murder.” Miss Pinkerton has, she believes,
witnessed two – maybe three – murders, but before she can arrive at Scotland
Yard she’s mowed down by a rogue motorist. Coincidence? Not in the mind of
Fitzwilliam, who immediately heads to Miss Pinkerton’s village, Wychwood, to investigate
the crimes. There, he teams up with Bridget Conway (The Rings of Power’s
Morfydd Clark), a former secretary who is now engaged to the obnoxious Lord
Whitfield (Tom Riley). As they nose around the village’s business, their mutual
attraction grows, just as the body count rises.
On his jaunt in the country, Fitzwilliam
encounters a bevy of British TV character actors: Tamzin Outhwaite, Mark
Bonnar, Mathew Baynton, and Douglas Henshall (among others). It may not quite
match the wattage of the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express (Sean Connery,
Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave) or the 1978
Death on the Nile (Mia Farrow, David Niven, Jane Birkin, not to mention Maggie
Smith and Bette Davis), but it’s a decent lineup. The sort of decent lineup
we’ve grown accustomed to in recent festive Christie adaptations. With Kenneth
Branagh doing his big screen best (which is not very good) tackling the Poirot
novels, the BBC has chosen to adapt a series of Christie’s less celebrated
standalone works: The Pale Horse, Ordeal by Innocence, Witness for the
Prosecution, and now Murder is Easy. It is a decision that gives them the
freedom to experiment, without fear of being held in contrast to the great
adaptations of the past.
That freedom here is best expressed by a new
interest in late-colonialism and middle England’s racism. Jonsson’s Fitzwilliam
represents the first time a Christie protagonist has been played by a Black
actor, and the narrative embraces that new development. “Behold the imperial
African,” Fitzwilliam’s friend at the West Africa Club announces.
“Self-colonised, collaborating with his oppressors.” As with all creative
decisions that promote a more diverse and inclusive agenda, it will provoke
both the tabloid media and easily offended viewers, but many of Christie’s
works are thoroughly engaged with the consequences of empire. Bringing the
action forward by a couple of decades allows the creators to gerrymander some
more progressive ideals into the story. While Christie’s views might not have
been expressed in quite such bluntly liberal terms (“Gordon likes to collect
nice things,” Bridget observes, of her fiance’s treasury of African artifacts;
“Not really his nice things though, are they?” Fitzwilliam responds), there has
always been a sufficiently distinguishable native thread of interest in these
matters for it to be extrapolated out to a broader canvas.
This is something the show does well enough,
but it is one of the few things to achieve even basic competence. Where Sarah
Phelps’s adaptations for the BBC (And Then There Were None, for example, or her
reimagining of The ABC Murders) were shrouded in a very modern darkness, Sian
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s adaptation of Murder is Easy falls between two stools. Too
bland to excite the violent impulses of the Line of Duty generation, yet
insufficiently zippy or playful to stir Christie aficionados. The script is only
part of the problem: more striking, perhaps, is the cheapness of the design.
Rather than shooting for the murkiness of Scandinoir, Murder is Easy manages to
be both over-saturated and over-exposed, while the costumes, locations and cars
all have that counter-intuitively anachronistic air of being “vintage”. It is
striking that, in the 34 years since David Suchet’s Poirot first aired on ITV,
the aesthetic quality of Christie adaptations seems to have regressed.
Against this unsatisfying backdrop, Jonsson
tries hard to assert his authority. It is never easy playing a disposable dick
– neither Poirot nor Marple; never going to spark a franchise – but Jonsson is
not aided by what the kids are calling CRF (chronic rizz face). “Bridget, why
are you marrying that man?” he purrs at Clark’s vivacious temptress. Both are
in the Tommy and Tuppence mould – spunky and selfless – yet, like most things
with this adaptation, more washed out than intended. They navigate their way
around a convoluted plot like Theseus delicately, clumsily, returning to
Ariadne.
If British television wishes to continue
adapting Christie’s novels – which doubtless it does, given there are many that
are yet to receive a primetime airing – then they’d be advised to remember what
makes them so popular. Propulsive, compulsive plots, a distinctive vision of
Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and a radical, by the standards
of modern mysteries, coherence. Murder might be easy, but a good murder mystery
is far less straightforward.
Murder is
Easy on BBC One review: give this silly, self-important take on Christie a miss
this Christmas
Murder may be easy, but watching this is hard
MELANIE MCDONAGH
On the Third Day of Christmas the BBC gives us
… one of the least congenial Agatha Christie adaptations I can think of.
I have nothing, obviously, against murder at
Christmas, though in Murder is Easy there is something of an embarrassment of
riches. It’s the way, yet again, that contemporary preoccupations are foisted
onto a period piece where they are simply not at home.
It’s not that the novel is good enough to get
worked up about. It’s not, frankly, one of the great lady’s best, though she
does prove, yet again, that spinster ladies are a force to be reckoned with.
And even for those of us who are up for
festive homicide, there are rather too many in this story – I lost count after
four – for us to care especially about the victims. Personally I stopped caring
after the maid who swallowed hat paint instead of cough linctus.
Still, the beginning is promising. It would
take a hard heart not to be entertained by an elderly lady called Miss
Pinkerton – here, a daffy Penelope Wilton – unburdening herself on a train to a
sympathetic young retired policeman, Luke Fitzwilliam, just back from India,
about the number of murders in her little village. She’s off to Scotland Yard
to tell them. Except, you know what? She doesn’t get there.
But before we even get to that point, this
production, adapted from the novel by Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre goes off-piste
with a very odd (for Agatha Christie) prelude showing a young black man – David
Jonsson as a very comely Luke Fitzwilliam – running through a forest, pursued
by unseen forces. And whereas the original detective is former Indian service,
this Luke is Nigerian and is taking himself off to London to work for a bigwig
baronet in Whitehall.
But you don’t think the production is going to
leave it at that, do you? Oh no. No sooner does Luke find his cousin at a West
African Education Centre, he’s in for a roasting from his cousin’s wife for
working for a Colonial Butcher and, for good measure she declares Luke is
self-colonised and collaborating with the oppressors.
No wonder the poor man takes himself off to
Miss Pinkerton’s village in deepest shiredom to investigate her serial killer
theory. And if it seems far fetched for him to try to pass himself off as a
cultural anthropologist investigating links between death practice in the
shires and Nigeria, you can blame Agatha Christie.
Inevitably, Luke encounters all the petty
prejudices you might have expected from the locals – not least Lord Whitfield
(Tom Riley hamming it up for all he’s worth), a boy from the village made good
through war profiteering.
It's not just colonialism that Ejiwunmi-Le
Berre is gunning for with this adaptation. Nope. It’s the wicked lord, who’s
out to grind the faces of the poor by using his ill gotten gains to set up a
new model town.
The rustics resent it, and so does the
tiresome vicar, Humbleby (Mark Bonnar) who lambasts Lord Whitfield over dinner
for not spending the money on affordable housing, thereby ventriloquising
Angela Rayner.
The trouble with this village – and the fault
is the author’s – is that there are just too many potential serial killers in
it. One is Mathew Baynton (Horrible Histories) as Dr Thomas who signals his
horrible nature by showing Fitzwilliam his little volume on Racial Selection;
the quest for the Master Race.
It's hard to take the novel seriously, and
it’s impossible to take this silly, self-aggrandising, preposterous adaptation
at its own estimation. Give it a miss. Look, at this time of year, there are
charades to be played, pudding to eat up, relations to entertain; don’t shun
any opportunity not to watch this. Murder may be Easy; watching it is the hard
part.
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