Film Reviews

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GO WAH-WAH Richard E. Grant’s semiautobiographical drama lifts the lid on both what inspired the sourpuss sneer and gimlet eyes this gifted character actor has perfected since making his film debut in the hilarious Withnail and I (1987) and how different Grant the man is from his icily pent-up screen persona. Wah-Wah chronicles the writer-director’s upbringing — if that’s what you can call a childhood that hung him out to dry with feuding parents (wonderfully played by Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson, who’s right up there with Grant in the department of bitter rage) in a British expatriate community during the last wheeze of British Empire in 1960s Swaziland. Though far from expert filmmaking — visual clichés fly thick and fast — the movie has a swooning feel for the stark beauty of the African kingdom in which it was shot. As you’d expect, Grant works expertly with a terrific ensemble that features Emily Watson as Byrne’s vitally blowsy American second wife; Julie Walters as a dumpy jettisoned wife who falls in love with Byrne and ends up mothering the confused adolescent Grant surrogate (a strikingly beautiful Nicholas Hoult); and the excellent Celia Imrie as snob-in-chief of the loony band of colonials, with their idiotic baby talk, casual racism, pathetic insistence on badges of bygone status and myopic inability to see why they’re being chucked out by a newly independent nation. Grant doesn’t gloss over the wounds he endured at the hands of his hair-raisingly ill-equipped parents, who were clearly enough to make an artist out of anyone, but in his maturity he bestows on them and their obsolescent pals a compassion that lines this sorry tale with silver. (Selected theaters) (Ella Taylor)