Teresa Reviews “After the Funeral” (2006)

Teresa reviews “After the Funeral” (2006) and wishes they had reworked the painting so the plot made more sense.

Fidelity to text: 4 hatchets

Mostly minor changes, some of which made no sense.

Quality of film on its own: 3½ hatchets

It worked, but it dragged in spots. Murky motivation, overlooked clues, and missed opportunities.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

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

This is not the first filmed version of After the Funeral. Back in 1963, Margaret Rutherford starred in Murder at the Gallop, a retitled adaptation. She did the sleuthing as Miss Marple (!). To say that it loosely followed the text is being kind. Adaptations like this were why Agatha became increasingly gun-shy about selling her works to Hollywood.

This version — far more acceptable — made its own changes, some of which improved on Agatha’s story. Yet like Margaret Rutherford’s version, it made its share of nonsensical changes too. Worse, it didn’t do justice to Miss Gilchrist, a wonderful character in the Agatha pantheon. You could describe her as Everywoman, struggling gamely against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. She used to be somebody, a respected member of the local business community, the owner of a teashop. She had some status and her own money.

But she lost her teashop through no fault of her own, had no family, training, or money to fall back on, and so, in late middle-age, is forced to work as a companion, lackey, and dogsbody to Cora Gallaccio, a woman she’s come to loathe.

Imagine how you’d feel if you’d poured your heart, soul, and life’s savings into a tiny, local coffee shop in your hometown. You were doing okay. Hanging on. You don’t have a family to fall back on. Your coffee shop is all you have. Then Starbucks opened up across the street and obliterated you. That’s Miss Gilchrist’s situation.

If she wants a roof over her head and regular meals, Miss Gilchrist has to swallow her pride. One thing the film does well is show the callousness of the Abernethie family, particularly Susannah. Susannah got a name-change completely out of keeping with her character, lost a worthless husband, and gained a vocation as a missionary doing God’s work in South Africa. Yet Susannah, who should know better, treats Miss Gilchrist with the empathy of a queen ordering a peasant to scrub a floor.

Watch her meet Miss Gilchrist for the first time. Susannah’s come to stay and inspect the cottage that Gilchrist shared with Aunt Cora. Cora’s been brutally murdered in bed with seven hatchet blows to the face. Although it’s not shown, Miss Gilchrist had to clean up the murder scene, scrubbing brains, bone fragments, flesh and blood from the room. With Cora dead, she’s got no place to go. When Susannah and Miss Gilchrist meet, Miss Gilchrist has her hands full with mail and full milk bottles. Does Susannah notice or care? No, she promptly hands her suitcase over to be carried upstairs.

She’s not a servant, you see. It made me wonder why Susannah was so hot to help unfortunate African children far away when the London slums (and every other slum in England) were crammed with needy, hungry, equally deserving children. I suppose those children didn’t count any more than Miss Gilchrist does.

The other Abernethies weren’t any kinder. Why should they care?

The Abernethie family isn’t a caring family in general. Cora was the youngest of the siblings, Richard the oldest. Timothy’s somewhere in between. Richard, Timothy and the other family members had nothing to do with Cora after she married an Italian painter and later divorced him. That was an unneeded change. In the novel, Cora was the widow of a French painter. The art expert was someone she knew, not her ex-husband.

What the Abernethie family did know about Cora was they didn’t like her. She’s socially challenged, prone to blurting out what everyone else is pretending not to notice. She’s not quite simple-minded because she’s often, to everyone’s dismay, correct.

Thus, when Cora announces after the funeral that Richard, the wealthy head of the family, was murdered, the family must take notice. They’re already shaken up by the reading of the new will. George, the favored nephew and only member of the next generation with the Abernethie name, has been disinherited. The money is being divided up amongst the surviving family.

They’re happy, but stunned. George (Michael Fassbender) takes it hard, spending virtually every moment onscreen snapping at his mother (who married Richard’s brother) or drunk or both.

That was another change. George discovers that his mother and uncle were lovers so his adored father wasn’t his father. The night before he dies, Richard tells him, “George, I am your father.” It’s not quite the same as learning that Darth Vader is your father, but George handles it about as well as Luke Skywalker.

I understand that the film didn’t want to reveal secrets until the climax but we needed to see more than George drunk and maudlin. His setup was inadequate.

A totally unneeded change was having Timothy (Richard’s younger brother) and Maude steal the deed to Enderby from the lawyer. That made no sense at the time, it made no sense when Bill and I walked around the block discussing the film, it didn’t make sense when we hashed it over during our podcast, and it doesn’t make sense now. No explanation was given, other than the plot needed a red herring.

There were other changes in store. The painting that Cora bought at a yard sale transforms from a Vermeer to a Rembrandt. I dunno. It’s true that Rembrandt would be more familiar to an audience, especially the painting they showed (remarkably similar to Man with a Golden Helmet). But it was hard for me to believe that even someone as batty as Cora wouldn’t recognize it. The producer should have stuck with Vermeer.

What was really irksome was Poirot’s reveal of the Rembrandt. The painting was hidden under an indifferent seascape. The film expects you to believe that the art authenticator removed the seascape, examined the painting, then restapled the bad canvas over the Rembrandt. He then allowed Poirot to cut the canvas off for the big reveal.

Really? Really? Poirot is allowed to slide a pocket knife right next to a priceless painting? Nicking the paint!

Were there good changes? Yes, why Rosamund kept her baby. As an actress with an unfaithful husband, the last thing she needs is getting fat and sloppy with pregnancy and then having to cope with an infant. Seeing the abortionist with her tools of her trade, washing bloody cloths in the sink, would make anyone uneasy.

Simplifying the Abernethie family tree was very worthwhile. Any book that needs a genealogy chart is too complicated to film.

But there should have been more emotion and better set ups. Poirot revealed too much at the climax, as though he pulled the solution out of his boutonnière vase. He says how he knew Susannah lied but not how he knew George lied, an equally important point. He knew Timothy lied, but the audience didn’t. We never learned why Timothy decided to be professional invalid (in the book it was the only way he could compete with Richard). Why did Helen have the affair with Richard?

But most of all, we didn’t get enough of Miss Gilchrist. She was trapped. But when she saw her path to freedom, she took a hatchet to Cora and let loose all her rage and fury at her hated employer and her ruined life. Miss Gilchrist is not a typical villain. She’s Everywoman, wanting a little business of her own and some independence until fate took it all away. She could be you and me.