Richard III did not need a horse for his kingdom. He just wanted Philippa Langley.
Langley, a single mother and amateur historian based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has become increasingly obsessed with the late English monarch, who has long been portrayed as one of history’s greatest villains. The supposedly hunchbacked king, who is said to have murdered his nephews, was suspected by Langley and others of a centuries-old smear campaign.
The longstanding consensus for Richard III was formed by the Tudors, who assassinated Richard and took the throne. It is, of course, a narrative forever cemented by Shakespeare’s great play. For Richard and his supporters, it was not just a winter of discontent, but about 500 years. “All fairy tales condemn me as a villain,” says the king in Richard III.
Except The Lost King.
A new film by Stephen Frears, which hits theaters on Friday, dramatizes the true story of Langley’s relentless quest to unearth Richard’s true history, as well as his real, long-lost remains – a journey that, remarkably, leads to a parking lot in Leicester.
It’s the sort of comic, eminently British underdog story that Frears excels at. And with Sally Hawkins playing Langley as a woman undeterred by pompous academics and condescending naysayers, The Lost King turns into a charmingly funny tale of bygone and recently re-evaluated.
The Lost King — which could have been a good double feature with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard — brings together most of the creative team that worked on Frears’ 2013 Oscar-nominated film Philomena. It is written by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope and is based on Langley’s memoir. Coogan also plays Langley’s estranged husband, who has a mostly supportive relationship with her, sharing custody of their sons.
Although it is a much more modest mystery than North by Northwest—played mostly at kitchen tables, in bookstores, and at meetings in Richard III Society pubs—Frears lends his modest film a few wide-screen flair, including in the style of Saul Bass. opening credits and score by Alexandre Desplat in the style of Bernard Herrmann. Here, too, an innocent man. He’s just half a millennium old.
But mostly Frears intelligently captures every quicksilver gesture of the brilliant Hawkins. When we meet Langley Hawkins, she has reached the decline of middle age. Worried about chronic fatigue syndrome, Langley is missed at work. Her marriage fell apart. She passes away. But after attending a performance of Richard III, she is fascinated by the monarch and recognizes him as someone else who has been unfairly written off for a supposed disability. double: resurrect a marginalized monarch and assert his place in the world.
En route, Langley is visited by Richard III himself in the guise of the actor (Harry Lloyd) who played him in the production that inspired it in the first place. These are muted scenes, if we talk about phenomena. I can’t help thinking that this was Coogan’s chance to play a military general and say the line “Gentlemen to bed” from The Ride. But be that as it may, Coogan is rather reserved in The Lost King and gets one of the film’s best monologues, lamenting both the demonization and the sanctification of historical figures or anyone else. “We are all in the middle,” he says.
The Lost King is very happy to be in the middle with a protagonist who does something extraordinary despite being repeatedly told how ordinary she is. Frears, who found humanity in royalty and nobility in nonentities, brings each scene to life with a little bit of comic relief from everyday life. Richard can be tested, but there are bad guys here too. In the final third of the film, officials from the University of Leicester descend to pay attention to Langley, a characterization the university has called unfair and inaccurate. The wheel turns: if one villain leaves the stage, another must enter.
The Lost King, an IFC Films release, received a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association for profanity and brief suggestive references. Duration: 109 minutes. Three stars out of four.
