“God Save the King” has never been the most beautiful or melodic of national anthems, and its somewhat reprehensible and aggressive tenor comes to the fore at the beginning of “The Choral.” Following the delivery of good news from the front in the midst of the grim First World War, an English village choir’s vigorous, spontaneous performance of the song interrupts their rather more lamentable rehearsal of Edward Elgar’s complex and disturbing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius,” prompting the choir’s genteel director Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) to roll his eyes. “If only you would sing Elgar with the confidence with which you sing the national anthem,” he murmurs. For Guthrie, art means much more than patriotism, and the happy surprise of Nicholas Hytner’s film—despite its campy, Veddy English trappings—is that it largely takes his side.
Maybe that’s not a surprise. “The Choral” is, after all, the first original script in more than 40 years from Alan Bennett, a 91-year-old national treasure whose place in Britain’s cultural firmament has never been clearly defined: A queer, agnostic, working-class northerner, he is a staunch realist who rejected a knighthood and whose politics have traveled along a spectrum he once described as “conservative socialism.” Many of those contrasts and conflicts are present in “The Choral” (some for better, some for worse, but interestingly enough in each case), even if Hytner, the director who previously shot Bennett’s scripts for “The Madness of King George,” “The History Boys” and “The Lady in the Van,” gives the overall package a deceptively buttery sheen of tea-and-bun nostalgia.
At first glance, the film seems like a brilliant fusion of two styles of British crowd-pleasing film: the keep-calm-and-carry-on portrait of wartime resilience, and the underdog story, like “The Full Monty” with the radio dial tuned to “Land of Hope and Glory” instead of “You Sexy Thing.” The year is 1916, and the setting is the picturesque (and fictional) industrial town of Ramsden, in Yorkshire, whose hills and honey-cobbled streets seem protected from the war ravaging the continent, except for its exhausting effect on the town’s young people. With each wave of recruitment, they leave the city’s picturesque train station, bright-eyed and neatly uniformed, only to return bitter and incomplete, if anything.
Until his own name is called, Lofty (Oliver Briscombe), a 17-year-old postman, spends his days delivering tragic messages to newly bereaved women in Ramsden, although his horny friend Ellis (Taylor Uttley) sees the bright side: “Pain, it’s an opportunity,” he says cheerfully. There is also an opportunity for the boys in the village choir, severely deprived by the demand for male voices, and soon also for their young choir director. Enter Guthrie, a prodigiously urbane conductor who was once of some renown, though highly disapproved of by locals for a number of reasons, including the fact that he spent several years living and studying in Germany. His unapologetic atheism doesn’t help; nor other “peculiarities” that no one wants to name precisely. “Let’s just say I’d prefer a family man,” says prudish board member Duxbury (Roger Allam), and leaves it at that.
Guthrie’s homosexuality remains more or less covert throughout Bennett’s script, although Fiennes plays him with a typically elegant and understated air of melancholy, his mourning turned inward for loves and lovers he can never name. There are unanswered overtures from the choir’s pianist, Horner (Robert Emms), a soft, vulnerable young man whose status as a conscientious objector makes him an odd companion. But “The Choral” is more concerned with the romantic lives of its younger characters, as Ellis, Lofty and their fellow future teenage soldiers desperately seek to lose their virginity before potentially losing their lives. Those in his sights include Mary (Amara Okereke), a golden-voiced Salvation Army officer who hasn’t yet loosened a button, and Bella (Emily Fairn), a braver person who eagerly awaits the return of her injured boyfriend Clyde (ensemble standout harrowing Jacob Dudman), though she may not be equipped to heal his trauma.
Bennett’s script oscillates inconsistently between generations, foregrounding certain perspectives before they suddenly disappear, though the film is never less than fun, with Guthrie’s ambitious plan to stage Elgar’s lofty work (with an out-of-tune choir and a three-person orchestra) giving the proceedings a satisfying narrative drive. If it doesn’t culminate in the against-the-odds artistic triumph one might hope for, here’s a more honest and nuanced moral in favor of artistic aspiration, integrity and commitment all at the same time, via a hilariously deflated and dismissive cameo from Simon Russell Beale as Elgar himself.
But then the film is at its best when it quietly clashes with our expectations of gentle, comforting viewing of the British, whether sharing Guthrie’s dry exasperation at displays of national pride, or eschewing dank romanticism for its one improbable sex scene: a dispassionate, reluctant handjob on the moors, quietly staged but tenderly illustrative of bodies. and souls torn apart by war and the English reservation. There are ugly open wounds in “The Choral,” even if they have been carefully and elegantly dressed by Mike Eley’s pristine lensing, George Fenton’s lush score and Jenny Beavan’s perfectly pressed costumes. At its best, Bennett’s writing cuts through the gauze.
