Teresa Reviews Adventure of Johnny Waverley (2015)

Teresa reviews Adventure of Johnny Waverley (2015), an episode from Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie entitled The Strange Disappearance of Little Bruno (L’Étrange Enlèvement du petit Bruno) and wished the mystery writer in the story wrote the script.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 kidnappers
Little Bruno is kidnapped by the same kidnapper but everything else is altered from a little to a lot.

Quality of film: 2 kidnappers
The production company can do better than this. There are enough plot holes, missed opportunities, and idiocies to fill a château.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

One of the recurring issues with an ongoing series that adapts someone else’s material is how do you integrate your leads into the original story? You’re paying those actors to emote and they, naturally, expect significant amounts of screentime. This is why they signed on. Not getting screentime leads an actor to immediately suspect that they’re being written out of the series, to be replaced by someone cheaper and more willing to perform whatever the producer and director want. Thus, our actresses tolerate being bullied idiots onscreen because, hey, it’s showbiz!
Writers don’t generally have this problem. Whether your characters are galley slaves (as Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) swore his were) or you take dictation from the voices in your head, you control the show. Thus, when Agatha wanted to get rid of our man Hastings who narrated the original short story this travesty is based on, she married him off and shipped him to Argentina, where he couldn’t complain or go on strike.

One solution for a TV series like Les Petits Meurtres where the production company already eagerly performs wholesale rewrites is to adapt a bare bones short story like “The Adventure of Johnny Waverly.” There’s plenty of innuendo and unfinished plot threads to expand on (see my review of the Poirot episode). Even better, since Les Petits Meurtres episode are 90 minutes, there’s plenty of room to give the leads plenty to do and still retain the core of the story.

And that’s what happened here. Little Bruno (Johnnie Waverly) is threatened with kidnapping if an increasingly large ransom isn’t paid. His father Hadrien (Marcus Waverly) is frantic. After this, the story starts morphing. The threats are weirdly specific to mom’s job; she’s a fabulously successful writer of mysteries, wealthy enough to purchase a huge château and staff it with real servants (you see them lined up).

Yes, it’s wishful thinking fiction because darn few mystery writers are this successful. But a scriptwriter can dream.
Even more strangely, mom Eloïse (Ada Waverly) doesn’t care if little Bruno is kidnapped. As she tells Avril, she stopped wanting him around within three days of his birth. He gets in the way of her writing career. She already ignores and neglects teenage Gérard, the son from her first marriage. He lasted three weeks in her affections.

Gérard is a great example of what’s wrong with this film. He’s an interesting character with plenty of grievances toward mom and the resented stepdad whom he refers to as “that fencing master.” He pants after Avril and Marlène, which they rebuff. (Does Gérard pant after hot blonde nanny, Régine? You’d think so based on how he reacts to Avril and Marlène but you won’t see any evidence.) He sets traps on the château grounds. His father disappeared years ago, no one knows where to. And does this amount to anything? Gérard’s plot culminates in a false confession to Laurence to get attention.

Otherwise? Nothing. You don’t learn why he sets the traps or who they’re for. You don’t learn why he loathes his stepfather other than bog-standard stepfather tropes. And you learn virtually nothing about his father’s mysterious activities, what actually happened to him, why Eloïse divorced him to marry her fencing master, or what he’s doing now except that he might be implicated in the kidnapping.

Nor do you learn anything about Gérard’s relationship with his much younger half-brother. I don’t think we see a single scene where they speak to each other. Does he resent Bruno? Like Bruno? You won’t learn. You also don’t learn if he has any kind of reconciliation with his mother, the kind of woman who ensures therapists remain in business.

You won’t learn why Eloïse can’t manage to find the time to write her novels despite having a château’s worth of money, a devoted staff, a fulltime nanny for Bruno so she never has to see the brat, and a supportive husband. She does find the time to fence with him.

You won’t learn what Gilles (a loose interpretation of Tredwell the butler) saw that made him blackmail Hadrien. Nor will you learn why Hadrien — in his efforts to get rid of his blackmailer — chooses to put a wasp in Gilles’ car as the murder weapon. That’s more wishful thinking on the part of the screenwriter. Perhaps the idea was that Gilles would panic and wreck his car when he saw the wasp? Since he’s allergic? Instead of doing the sensible thing of stopping, opening the windows, getting out of the car ,and waiting until it flew away?

You won’t learn if Hadrien is having an affair with hot blonde nanny, Régine. The implication is hinted at but never brought out. Why else would she help him in the kidnapping plot? He’s bribing her with the promise of a future payout? Nor will you learn why the tramp participated in the plot other than … a role he can parlay into better roles? Money? That’s always a good answer.

You won’t learn why Laurence who’s supposed to be the smartest cop around doesn’t investigate Hadrien’s background when he’s looking into the mysterious former husband’s!

You won’t learn why Laurence — when he finds a safety pin in the red glop Marlène makes for him while on stakeout duty — immediately accuses Avril of trying to kill him. Based on what’s onscreen, Avril never went near Marlène’s kitchen. Based on what we’ve seen to date, Avril barely understands the purpose of a kitchen.

You won’t learn why, if the ransom notes and their imagery of headless birds come right out of Eloïse’s books, she’s oblivious. Nor will you learn why someone stuffed a dead yet surprisingly intact wasp into the headless bird.

You also won’t learn the answer to the biggest question of all. The film opens with Laurence’s funeral. Yay! The Lille police department will get a less toxic commissaire! No such luck, of course. Laurence’s character isn’t being written out of the script, so he can be replaced with a new, less abusive to his underlings commissaire. We leap back into the past, eight days ago, to watch Laurence investigate. Along the way, he refuses to listen to Avril’s information. She impedes the investigation. All the usual junior high school hijinks ensue. Then — yay! — Laurence gets shot when he figures out where Bruno was kept hidden. How did he break into the château without being noticed? How did the gunman know he was coming and race up those stairs to the hidden room? And most of all, how did he get his funeral arranged without a body? More people than Marlène had to be involved but again, you won’t learn a single thing about how they did it.

What you will see is darn few people showed up for Laurence’s funeral. There were plenty of empty seats in that church. You’d think it would be fuller, if only to make sure he was dead. That must be why the murderer did the most hackneyed thing that murderers do in cheap detective fiction: he showed up to get caught.

This could have been better if a successful mystery writer like Eloïse had written the script instead of whoever delivered this.