Carey Mulligan, left, and Tom Basden in a scene from ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island.’Alistair Heap/The Associated Press
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Directed by James Griffiths
Written by Tom Basden and Tim Key
Starring Tom Basden, Tim Key and Carey Mulligan
Classification PG; 99 minutes
Opens in select theatres April 4
In The Ballad of Wallis Island, a lottery winner spends a fortune on a concert. No, the movie isn’t a critical response to how much it costs to see Beyoncé or Oasis with today’s obscene ticket prices. Instead, it’s a cozy and quaint comedy about lonely people finding comfort and connection in harmony.
Co-writers Tim Key and Tom Basden reprise their roles from The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, their 2007 British short film in which Key plays the lottery winner who forks over half a million pounds so Basden’s folk star can visit his home on an island and put on a performance for an audience of just one.
Almost two decades later, Key and Basden – and the short’s director, James Griffiths, returning for duty – stretch that quirky premise out to feature length. Although the light material struggles to sustain that runtime, there’s something lovely and playful about the way Key and Basden leisurely explore how much can evolve – in their approach to the story, and the characters themselves – on an island that time seems to have forgotten.
Wallis Island, which people can reach on a tiny motorboat when its captain feels like it, is all rocky hills surrounded by grey crashing waters. The only signs of life are a convenience store, run by a woman who has never heard of a peanut butter cup, and a single archaic payphone, which is the only way to reach the outside world as no one on Wallis Island carries cellphones. If they did, they’d struggle to even find a signal.
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Suffice to say, it’s the perfect setting for a horror movie. If Key’s eccentric millionaire Charles – an obsessive super-fan hovering over Basden’s Herb McGwyer – weren’t so cuddly, he’d be the ideal villain.
Herb is the washed-up folk singer seeking cash to reignite his career. His clumsy arrival on Wallis Island’s harbourless shores, spilling all his belongings in the water as he struggles to make landfall, is both pratfall and metaphor.
“Can I get some rice for my phone,” Herb asks. “Amazing sentence,” Charles responds, confused and clueless as to how the rest of the world remedies a submerged device.
Herb is instantly inundated by Charles, who upsells the peace and quiet his island has to offer, though he’s always keen on filling any silence with cheery observations, silly puns, intrusive questions and his simple generosity.
So much of the winning humour here is predicated on Charles’s remote and idiosyncratic way of life, and Key’s hilariously off-tempo delivery whenever his character attempts conversation with his frustrated musician guest.
Key, a poet and comic famous for playing Sidekick Simon next to Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge, is a delight opposite Basden’s straight man. His Charles rapidly spouts off confounding pleasantries that score audible laughs and warrant a rewatch, because I suspect there’s always more to the gags and not enough time to savour them before he lands another.
The sadder side to his character – a widower who chooses to spend his fortune to live in isolation – is largely kept in check, masked by his eager hospitality, as if he couldn’t bear imposing anything gloomy on his guests.
Basden’s Herb, meanwhile, spends most of the movie in his own feelings. He’s no longer enjoying the glory days when he was part of the duo, McGwyer Mortimer, and is now struggling to launch his latest pop album.
The other half of that duo, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), is also Herb’s old flame. So when, much to his surprise, she arrives on the island with a husband in tow – a reunion mischievously orchestrated by their fan, Charles – Herb gets a little messy, in a movie that largely keeps things unbelievably nice and tidy.
Things play out as sentimentally as expected, while scratching the surface at something deeper, exploring the relationship people have to music, and how that can either change or stay frozen in time.
For Herb and Nell, old feelings are embalmed in their songs, threatening to spill out when they return to them. And while these singers are so absorbed in what that music means to them, they seem oblivious to how much it affects their audience: the widower listening to them play, reliving his own memories through their music.
The Ballad of Wallis Island hits those melancholic notes gently, as if they’re not trying to reach the rafters with big emotional swings. That makes the movie, too, feel like it’s being played for an audience of just one.
