If I’m being honest, by the time The Ballad of Wallis Island started wrapping things up, I wasn’t sure that I even liked it. I’d expected it to be a small movie, and my choice to see it in a theater was only partly to make full use of my AMC subscription, but mostly to give it the best chance possible to charm me.
The premise is that Herb, a musician who’d been half of the folk duo McGwyer and Mortimer before going off on a less successful solo career, is hired for a small performance on a remote island. On arriving, he discovers that the audience for the show will be one man, Charles, a McGwyer and Mortimer superfan who’d won the lottery and could therefore afford to pay for the exclusive show. He then discovers that Charles isn’t that interested in the solo stuff, and he’s also hired McGwyer’s ex and former partner Nell to come to the island to perform their duets, and that she’s brought along her new husband.
But as much as I like the cast — in particular, I’ve liked Tim Key since Taskmaster and been a big fan of Carey Mulligan since she was in the best episode of Doctor Who — I didn’t find it quite as funny as I’d hoped I would. And while the music is very good, none of the songs had that transcendent quality I’d hoped from a movie devoted to the power of music to move people.
Most of the comedy comes from the fact that Charles’s character is impossibly awkward and unused to being around other people, especially since the death of his wife. There’s a strong sense that Tim Key and Tom Basden are riffing their way through much of the movie, hoping that the chemistry of their friendship will come through via their script. It’s kind of a risky move, because there’s a delicate balance between “charmingly awkward” and “exhausting,” and a significant part of the movie depends on your being more charmed than annoyed.
It also feels like a bit of a risk having Mulligan playing a part that is written like an actual human being would act in this situation. She’s essentially playing a happier version of the same role she played in Inside Llewyn Davis, as if we’d fast-forwarded a decade or so past her depression and into a well-adjusted life, but she still has no patience for men from her past who can’t get their shit together. It depends a lot on Mulligan’s charisma coming through, which she has in enormous supply. And the character of Nell is nice, friendly, and supportive, but it’s clear that she came to perform a concert and she simply has no desire to be a character in a romantic comedy.
One thing I liked a lot was when Herb was showing Nell the cover of his next album, a collection of collaborations called “Feat.” It shows him in sunglasses and a bucket hat and ridiculously whitened teeth, surrounded by money. He explains that the title is a play on “featuring,” as in Herb McGwyer feat. Other Artist Name.
The movie and the characters seem to focus on how shamelessly commercial the album cover is, how he’s posing at something that he’s not, while the McGwyer and Mortimer covers that we see feel a lot more genuine. I liked the slightly more subtle implication of it, which became more evident as the movie went on: not satisfied as a solo artist, he’s been trying in vain to recreate his most successful collaboration.
Or at least, it was a subtle implication, before a character comes right out and tells him this directly in a later scene. Which is my main disappointment with the movie, that there’s basically nothing that’s left unsaid or unexplained. If it seems like I’ve given away too much in a “spoiler-free” post about it, that’s just because I have a hard time imagining anyone who gets 30 minutes into this movie without being able to predict exactly how it’s going to end. So it ends up being a long time watching two men who don’t recognize the things that are plainly evident to everyone else.
But in the end, the movie is so heartfelt and so earnest that it was impossible for me not to be charmed and moved by it. And it feels like it’d be churlish of me to dismiss it. It’s ultimately a sweet movie about appreciating the time we get to have with people, and taking that with us as we move on.