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Tea with the Dames (Film Review)
UK title: Nothing like a Dame, starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright.
The definition of fanservice, in the best sense. Basically, a documentary in which director Roger Michell (who directed Peter O'Toole's beautiful swan song Venus and thus is no stranger to working with legends) feeds his four leading ladies cues, points cameras at them and lets them chat about work, husbands ("mine was the most difficult", says Joan Plowright, which, well, if you were married with Laurence Olivier...), jerk directors and aging. Which isn't belittlling Michell's - and his team's own work: intercut between Dames Dench, Smith, Atkins and Plowright chatting is footage from their career, and not the just the obvious tidbits but true rare gems in the form of filmed theatre footage or old tv interviews (he even found baby Judi Dench - in the sense of her being barely out of her teens - in the York Miracle Play! quoth Eileen Atkins, admiringly: "You've always had lovely tits, Jude"). But the great charm of this diverting enterprise consists of these ladies chatting away.
Not as if they were scripted by Oscar Wilde, I hasten to add - there are one liners, to be sure, but not in the rat-at-tat manner the characters played by these actresses would provide. And there are no big reveals of biographical secrets; for example, Maggie Smith states firmly, re: her marriage to Robert Stephens, that she prefers to think of the good days, and no descriptions of Stephens the alcoholic follow. It's not that kind of film. But it doesn't shy away from the awareness of what aging and mortality can also mean; Joan Plowright, the oldest, is blind now and has lost much of her hearing, and they all remember rolling their eyes at Edith Evans as young actresses, but not so much now. Otoh all four have such a keen sense of humor about it: Judi Dench's recounting of how the condescending medic who treated her when she was stung by a hornet asked her "do we have a caregiver?" is a comic masterpiece. ("I just did eight weeks in A Winter's Tale!")
They're also mordantly funny commenters on their own work. "Alan Rickman and I eventually ran out of expressions," is Maggie Smith's summation of shooting the Harry Potter movies. And then there are the surprising voltes. Judi Dench, re: how she got into the Bond franchise, mentions this was because her late husband Michael Williams was a spy fan. "Kim Philby was his idol."
The other three: "...????"
JD, elaborating, says there was this facing the press thing Philby did on tv at some point after Burgess & Mclean had skeedaddled and before he himself absconded, complete with having his Aged Mother at his side, and: "Every actor should watch that. The nerve! Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Who, me? I'm completely innocent. It's an acting master class."
(And then Michell actually provides the black and white tv footage in question of Kim Philby on British tv.)
(Another, very differnt thing about the use of old footage: Something I noticed, not for the first time, when comparing the footage of young Maggie Smith with her current self is that Toby Stephens looked nothing like his mother when younger - both when he was younger and when she was - but you can totally see the resemblance between them now.)
The most consistently articulate of the four turns out to be Eileen Atkins, which didn't surprise me since she's the only one who is also a writer. The recipient of the most (affectionate) ribbings is Judi Dench, for having first dibs on the roles these days ("my American agent told me, don't worry, there's be a cameo for you Judi Dench hasn't got her paws on yet"), but she's also the one given the last word: a beautiful, and in its understated tenderness not a little heartbreaking recitation of Prospero's "We are such stuff as dreams are made off " speech from The Tempest. And for all that this is essentially a cheerful film, celebrating these four actresses, you are, as a viewer, of course aware that any of them could leave us at any moment. But what joy (and sadness) they've given us through the years...
The definition of fanservice, in the best sense. Basically, a documentary in which director Roger Michell (who directed Peter O'Toole's beautiful swan song Venus and thus is no stranger to working with legends) feeds his four leading ladies cues, points cameras at them and lets them chat about work, husbands ("mine was the most difficult", says Joan Plowright, which, well, if you were married with Laurence Olivier...), jerk directors and aging. Which isn't belittlling Michell's - and his team's own work: intercut between Dames Dench, Smith, Atkins and Plowright chatting is footage from their career, and not the just the obvious tidbits but true rare gems in the form of filmed theatre footage or old tv interviews (he even found baby Judi Dench - in the sense of her being barely out of her teens - in the York Miracle Play! quoth Eileen Atkins, admiringly: "You've always had lovely tits, Jude"). But the great charm of this diverting enterprise consists of these ladies chatting away.
Not as if they were scripted by Oscar Wilde, I hasten to add - there are one liners, to be sure, but not in the rat-at-tat manner the characters played by these actresses would provide. And there are no big reveals of biographical secrets; for example, Maggie Smith states firmly, re: her marriage to Robert Stephens, that she prefers to think of the good days, and no descriptions of Stephens the alcoholic follow. It's not that kind of film. But it doesn't shy away from the awareness of what aging and mortality can also mean; Joan Plowright, the oldest, is blind now and has lost much of her hearing, and they all remember rolling their eyes at Edith Evans as young actresses, but not so much now. Otoh all four have such a keen sense of humor about it: Judi Dench's recounting of how the condescending medic who treated her when she was stung by a hornet asked her "do we have a caregiver?" is a comic masterpiece. ("I just did eight weeks in A Winter's Tale!")
They're also mordantly funny commenters on their own work. "Alan Rickman and I eventually ran out of expressions," is Maggie Smith's summation of shooting the Harry Potter movies. And then there are the surprising voltes. Judi Dench, re: how she got into the Bond franchise, mentions this was because her late husband Michael Williams was a spy fan. "Kim Philby was his idol."
The other three: "...????"
JD, elaborating, says there was this facing the press thing Philby did on tv at some point after Burgess & Mclean had skeedaddled and before he himself absconded, complete with having his Aged Mother at his side, and: "Every actor should watch that. The nerve! Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Who, me? I'm completely innocent. It's an acting master class."
(And then Michell actually provides the black and white tv footage in question of Kim Philby on British tv.)
(Another, very differnt thing about the use of old footage: Something I noticed, not for the first time, when comparing the footage of young Maggie Smith with her current self is that Toby Stephens looked nothing like his mother when younger - both when he was younger and when she was - but you can totally see the resemblance between them now.)
The most consistently articulate of the four turns out to be Eileen Atkins, which didn't surprise me since she's the only one who is also a writer. The recipient of the most (affectionate) ribbings is Judi Dench, for having first dibs on the roles these days ("my American agent told me, don't worry, there's be a cameo for you Judi Dench hasn't got her paws on yet"), but she's also the one given the last word: a beautiful, and in its understated tenderness not a little heartbreaking recitation of Prospero's "We are such stuff as dreams are made off " speech from The Tempest. And for all that this is essentially a cheerful film, celebrating these four actresses, you are, as a viewer, of course aware that any of them could leave us at any moment. But what joy (and sadness) they've given us through the years...
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Alongside Rupert Penry-Jones and Anna-Louise Plowman, even, because it is the smallest of worlds.
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