Teresa Reviews: “Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures” (2004)

Fidelity to text: 3 hatchet jobs

It’s reasonably accurate, particularly since every word comes from Agatha’s memoirs or news reports. But the film glossed over a lot.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 hatchet jobs

It should have been better since there’s great story material present: romance, death, cheating, fugue states, amnesia, divorce, and a second chance at love. Instead, it was confusing and it dragged.

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This is a reasonably accurate depiction of Agatha’s early years, her eleven-day disappearance, Archie, Max Mallowan, and the tenth anniversary celebration of The Mousetrap in which Agatha sat for a very rare interview with some reporters. All the dialog was taken from her autobiography, her very few interviews, and public reports. It’s beautifully shot, lovely period detail, and the acting works, other than Olivia Williams as Agatha with that brunette hair. The hair bothered me every time I saw it, because Agatha Christie was a redhead as a young woman, not a brunette.

If you’re going to tell me something is true-to-life, then get the hair color correct. Wigs and dyes are cheap.

Do you see a problem here? If the film had been more involving and less confusing, I wouldn’t focus on some hair stylist’s choice of hair color. Seeing an obvious mistake like this made me wonder how accurate the rest of the movie was. If I’m paying attention to little nits like hair, then the movie failed. Do you think I noticed Agatha’s hair color in the Vanessa Redgrave hatchet job? I did, but they got it right. The Doctor Who episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp” made Agatha a blonde, but it was close enough and the episode involving enough that I didn’t care.

The audience should never pay attention to camera pyrotechnics or notice how the set designer chose the wrong accessories for a period piece or that the time of year doesn’t match the spoken dialog. If the audience does, then the movie failed.

This film doesn’t exactly fail, but it never gelled for me either. It was reverential to the point of being dull. I’d still chose it over the Vanessa Redgrave horror, but then I’d chose virtually any Agatha Christie film over the Vanessa Redgrave horror.

Let’s start with the structure. I can handle flashbacks. But flashbacks within flashbacks get confusing, especially when I’m having trouble understanding the dialog. We move forward in time to when Agatha was 72. She’s at the tenth anniversary party for her play The Mousetrap. The opening scenes show the cake, with some very nice rolled fondant work in both mice and lettering. You see what I mean? I shouldn’t be noticing skillful fondant work on a cake! If I’m noticing the cake, then there must not be any plot!

Anyway. Agatha agrees to a rare interview for the occasion. Reporters ask questions and she reminisces. We swing back in time to her girlhood and young womanhood as needed. Back and forth, back and forth, and then sometimes sideways into the headshrinker’s office. The shrink is trying to get Agatha to figure out why she lost her memory and ended up in some spa in Harrogate.

I kept noticing the goldfish in the bowl on the table and wondering why the goldfish stuck to the bottom of the bowl instead of swimming around more. Was the water that dirty?

Darn it. I lost track of the plot again.

We meet Agatha’s feared nightmare figure, the Gunman. He’s a seedy man carrying a revolver. She wrote about him in her autobiography. The film never offers up any kind of explanation of why this happened to her. Perhaps she was psychic? Picking up on bad vibes in the astral plane? No, I shouldn’t be thinking about Agatha’s possible clairvoyant tendencies. Must focus on movie. She must not have had good ESP, because if she’d had, she would have not married Archie Christie.

One thing this film did right was show how hot Archie was for Agatha. He wanted her and he got her. It was probably a very passionate relationship. She didn’t want him to abandon her for Nancy Neele. I’m guessing — another missed plot area — that Archie cheated on Agatha with Nancy for months. Nancy was Ernest Belcher’s secretary. Belcher was the British government official who took Archie and Agatha on the round-the-world cruise in 1922 to promote the Empire Exhibition. Nancy didn’t come along on the ten-month-long cruise, so Archie didn’t meet her until afterwards. But meet her, he did.

No details were given, other than Archie was a narcissist who didn’t like being around anyone ill or unhappy. Agatha’s mother died in 1926, Agatha was distraught, and Archie threw fuel on the fire by demanding a divorce because Agatha wasn’t giving him the attention he thought he deserved and he didn’t want to be around a sad woman. No wonder she went crazy.

But as I said, the film’s chronology was weird, back and forth and sideways. While we’re getting this story, we also get the story of Agatha nursing wounded soldiers in a Torquay hospital during World War I. Everyone talks about her time spent in the dispensary, learning poisons, but working the wards with young men who’d endured the meatgrinder of WWI must have been its own trauma. Assisting in surgery? Cleaning up body parts? Nursing and scrubbing and bandaging young men missing limbs or horribly burned? No one ever talks about that part of her life, but it must have affected her.

It was at the dispensary that Agatha began working on Hercule Poirot and The Mysterious Affair at Styles. There’s a wonderful scene where she and another nurse are treating two Belgian refugees for lice, combing lice out of their hair while sprinkling them with lice powder. The ladies talk and the men sit quietly, not understanding a word. One of the refugees transforms into Hercule Poirot. One of the film’s better tricks is having the same actor who played the Belgian refugee turned into Poirot also play police commissioner Kenward, who led the search after her disappearance.

There’s also Mark Gatiss, playing a generic reporter named Kenyon. I’m not sure if he was a real person or the one made-up character in a crowd of real people. I can’t believe that a reporter in Harrogate during Agatha’s disappearance would have been so low-key, so willing to take his time and investigate, when every reporter in England was baying for news. Agatha’s disappearance made the front page of the New York Times. What English reporter is going to let himself be scooped by some Yank rag? Kenyon must be fake, to better smooth over documented discrepancies in what Agatha claimed happened and what did happen during her disappearance.

We also meet Max Mallowan, archeologist. That was apparently a much happier relationship (second chance at love!). Agatha married him at 39, two years after her divorce from Archie. Very little film was wasted on Max, despite them being together for 46 years.

So should you watch this? Sure, why not. It’s dull and muddled, but it’s far more accurate than Vanessa Redgrave’s travesty.