Teresa Reviews “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (2009) A Harridan, a Wimp, and Miss Marple Walk Into a Castle

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Fidelity to text: 2 poison bottles.
To start with, Miss Marple never came near the novel yet here she is: a friend of the family who pretends to be Frankie’s governess. Names were changed, characters were deleted, combined or made up from whole cloth, backstories altered, motivations were radically different. The centerpiece murder itself — complete with false wills, unwitting, dumb witnesses, and not asking Evans — remains the same.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 and 1/2 poison bottles.
I’d have given it four poison bottles but that ending was condensed into incomprehensibility. A few minutes here, a few minutes there of scene setting and important dialog would have made all the difference in the world. Sylvia Savage’s two children from marriage #1 appeared not just out of left field but teleported to England from a ball park in China, an easily corrected fault. As it was, Miss Marple had to pull the solution out of her knitting bag because we sure didn’t see her unearthing any evidence for her conclusion.

As with the original novel, we open with our hero, Bobby, out on the picturesque cliffs overlooking the sea. He’s not golfing as in the novel. He’s goofing off, to the amusement of local girls. If you think the opening was designed to demonstrate Bobby’s fecklessness, you’re right. By contrast, our heroine, Frankie, is so assertive she comes across as a pushy, don’t-confuse-me-with-facts harridan in training. If (as the movie implies in a badly underwritten conclusion) they get together, they’ll both be miserable. Frankie will wipe her feet on Bobby, he’ll let her, and she’ll despise him for it.

Bobby discovers the dying man whose last words are “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” and we’re off. Sort off. Bobby refuses the hero’s call, despite the urgings from Frankie (young and pretty and thus it’s incomprehensible that he says no) and Miss Marple (old and sharp but old ladies are routinely ignored by young men). But eventually he rises to the occasion and shows up to rescue Frankie, who’s sequestered in the castle, after his mini-London adventure.

Frankie, in the meantime, joyfully accepted the hero’s call and deliberately wrecked her car to enter the castle. And it is a castle. All it needed was a moat. There’re certainly enough crazy people wandering about in terms of family, hired pianists, loony friends, and the headshrinker next door operating his sanitarium full of crazy people, including his own wife.

What the castle is missing is servants. We only see the butler, Wilson, and the lazy, newly hired gardeners who never say a single word. Sylvia, matriarch of the family, bemoans the lack of servants. This is a clue, but a bad one, because it wasn’t followed up on properly. Where’s the cook who would tell Miss Marple family secrets? Where are the housemaids who know all the dirt? Or daily chars from the village who’d know the past history going back five generations? It is impossible for the cook to keep that pile clean when she’s cooking from scratch for a minimum of eight people three times a day plus tea followed by the washing up. There must be servants other than Wilson, the butler, but he’s the only one we see other than the two gardeners lazing about.

Wilson does hint to Miss Marple about Sylvia’s tragic history and the even more Shakespearean history of her two husbands; George (#1) and Jack (#2 and George’s younger brother). But he doesn’t hint enough to Miss Marple to make her solution plausible.

It’s a pity too, because up until the ending, the movie zipped along. We even get deadly orchids to go with the venomous snakes. Check out Tom, Sylvia’s younger son, dangling mice over the snake tanks. Snakes got to eat too and if they’re encased in glass boxes, they can’t go out and hunt on their own.

Sylvia is the heart of the mystery. Once you’ve seen the ending, you understand how she brought it all on herself. Marrying the older brother and then carrying on a torrid affair with the younger brother? Vulgar. Watching younger brother have older brother murdered in China? Vile. Marrying younger brother? Insane, even if it does get her out of prewar China and lets her remain in the castle. Not fighting husband #2 over abandoning husband #1’s children? Unconscionable and a darned good reason for her guilt. Having children with husband #2 despite knowing what kind of man he is? Dreadful, especially when she deliberately neglects these kids because of her guilt over her first set of children. She deserves to feel guilty! That woman brought her misery upon herself because she refused to control her own appetites. She wanted what she wanted and damn the consequences.

In case you’re wondering why Jack Savage (hubby #2) had his brother George’s (hubby #1) kids removed, it was probably to inherit the estates. The son would be the next peer, not him. Boys have become peers in infancy, with mom or an uncle acting as a regent. Younger brothers don’t inherit the estate unless older brother has zero male issue. In this case, the question is why didn’t Jack have the kids murdered along with their father. They were all in China, with no oversight from the British government and the neighbors. If Jack could get his brother murdered (thereby also removing an obstacle for the Japanese invasion), the kids would have been easy enough to slaughter.

Let this be a reminder, folks. If you murder your older sibling to inherit, make sure you kill older sibling’s kids too. They’ll come back and haunt you if you don’t.

There was so much to like about this movie. Watching mad women wander about the grounds in diaphanous white negligees is so gothic and perfectly in keeping with the castle’s own appearance and the sanitarium next door.

Listening to Evans talk about poisonous orchids and then watching him later have sex with his flowers. (He was hand-pollinating them. What, you think an orchid collector also raises the specialized insects needed to pollinate every variety of orchid he owns, including those from different continents? All flower breeders have sex with their flowers. They do it with paintbrushes and cotton swabs. Evans has more fun with his flowers than Frankie and Bobby will.)

There’s the shrink, who’s as loony as his patients, and the officious stuffed shirt, Commander Peters, who comes across as incompetent but probably isn’t. We get the louche pianist who flatters Sylvia, ignores her daughter, Dottie, whom he’s supposed to be teaching piano to, carries on with Moira, the shrink’s loony wife, and then chases after Frankie, claiming none of them mean anything to him.

Well, they don’t, or rather they matter very much, but not the way Frankie does. Luckily, she finally comes to her senses, which leads us to the underwritten and unsatisfying ending. Once again, Frankie is stranded by the side of the road (her wrecked car miraculously restored right down to an immaculate paint job). She’s got a flat tire. Bobby, driving the limo, stops to rescue her and discovers the spare is flat as well. They stare at each other meaningfully. Except there’s no dialog. Did Frankie slash her tires, hoping Bobby would stop? It’s not stated, so the audience is left wondering.

Too much of this movie went unstated. Ninety-three minutes was not enough time. Another ten minutes would have done the trick, filling in the missing bits of plot and then this Miss Marple outing would be the movie it was so valiantly struggling to be. One more pass on the script to better fill the empty spaces that did get filmed with useful and explanatory dialog. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so.

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