GLR March-April 2023

FILM

Still Tragic After All These Years

“I CONSIDERED starting with these words: I no longer want to kill you— because I really don’t.” So begins My Police man , Bethan Roberts’ 2012 romance novel, now a motion picture. The speaker is named Marion, a shy and sexually inexpe rienced schoolteacher, and the object of such mixed emotion is a man named Patrick, a handsome curator at the Brighton Museum andArt Gallery. What Marion and Patrick have in common is their shared

wide-legged trousers to arrest. Homosexu ality wouldn’t be decriminalized until 1967. As the title implies, My Policeman is about the law and the crushing effects of postwar bigotry. The book jacket states that Roberts was inspired by the real-life love triangle that involved novelist E. M. Forster, the po lice officer Bob Buckingham, and his wife May, though any parallel with real life ends there. Exactly ten years after the publication of My Policeman , director Michael Grand

C OLIN C ARMAN

MY POLICEMAN Directed by Michael Grandage Prime Video SPOILER ALERT Directed by Michael Showalter Focus Features

age and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner ( Philadelphia ) have adapted Roberts’ novel for the screen and cast Emma Corrin as Marion, David Dawson as Patrick, and pop star Harry Styles as the com pellingly seductive Tom. Corrin is best known for her star-mak ing performance as the young Princes Diana on “The Crown” and Harry Styles is, well, Harry Styles. The 28 year-old “it” boy who came to prominence in the boy band One Direction is now widely admired for his gender-bend ing audacity on-stage and off. My Policeman can only send his queer stock soaring. Any tale of triangular romance is a competition of per spectives. Roberts’ narrative is told in five parts and piv ots between Marion’s and Patrick’s points of view. She sees Patrick as a snob and a sybarite, while he views Mar ion as an obstacle to a happy life with “his” policeman. “Patrick is a sexual pervert,” she cries to Tom, “it’s obvi ous to everyone but you.” Things fall apart when a jilted Marion writes a letter to Patrick’s employer and outs him for gross indecency, which leads not only to the loss of his job but also imprisonment and a horrific beating behind bars. Between the flashbacks, we see the older Marion, Tom, and Patrick (Gina McKee, Linus Roache, and the out actor Rupert Everett, respectively) still sifting through the rubble of Marion’s betrayal. Spoiler Alert , starring Jim Parsons (as Michael) and Ben Aldridge (as Kit), purports to be a romantic comedy, but it’s far more tragic than My Policeman —surprisingly, because it’s set in post-Stonewall, post- Obergefell Amer ica. The title doesn’t do it justice; it’s not only spoiled like last month’s milk but dead on arrival. Michael Showalter, director of the chemo-comedy The Big Sick , pilots the plot from the early days of Michael and Kit’s love affair in New York City to Kit’s death in a hospital bed. Though Parsons gives a hammy performance, he is clearly challenging himself as an actor after twelve seasons on The Big Bang Theory . He was superbly slimy as Rock Hudson’s agent in Hol lywood and as the acerbic queen (another Michael) in Boys in the Band (both from Netflix). Written by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage (of the popular sex advice column, “Savage Love”), Spoiler Alert isn’t

idolization of “their” policeman—a bisexual bobby named Tom. Shuttling between dual time frames, the story begins in 1999 when an ailing Patrick has come to live with Marion (despite Tom’s protests) but jumps back to the late 1950s when the mem

Top: David Dawson and Harry Styles in My Policeman . Bottom: Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge in Spoiler Alert .

bers of this sexual triangle were luminously young and when words like “pervert” and “invert” were used to describe Patrick’s sexuality. The 1950s in England was a period in which plain clothes policemen were on the prowl for men in makeup and Colin Carman is the author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys .

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