The Choral

 Today after my early start I went to see the morning showing of The Choral released here today.

It is a British drama set in 1916 when Britain is in the throes of WWI;  a small Yorkshire mill town community with a choral society;  written by Alan Bennett (can he really still be writing at his age?... there is hope for us all) and directed by Nicholas Hytner.  (They did a collaboration with the The Lady and the Van and the History Boys previously).

If you are expecting a warm glow from a choir in a Yorkshire mill town you won't really get one.  It is also one of those annoying films where you see all (well almost) the good bits in the trailer and it gets your saliva going to see the film and then find that the trailer is the sum total of the good lines in the entire film.  

It kind of works and it doesn't as a film about the choir, World War I, adversity, horrors of men going to war and not coming back or being maimed and coming back, and conscripts and those left behind and some hint of subjects like queers and prostitutes thrown in, perhaps, I think.   It was like Bennett and Hytner chucked as much as they could at the mirror in the hope that some of it would stick. 

All in all I shuffled about a bit and at times almost thought, dare I say, that it was a bit boring.  Others will like it for sure.  There were some good performances - an oddly strange Elgar played by Simon Russell Beale - and Ralph Fiennes was the choir master.  The performances were good it was just a shame about the rest of it.