The Ballad of Wallis Island, review: a lovely, offbeat and very British comedy

Telegraph

5 days ago

Taciturn folk musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) prefers 'intimate' gigs, and is certainly promised that in the lovely, offbeat, acutely British comedy-drama The Ballad of Wallis Island. Indeed, for £500,000 in cash, he may wind up playing to an audience of one.
This deranged megafan is Charles (Tim Key), a hearty chatterbox and two-time Lottery winner who has lured Herb to the fictional island of the title, somewhere off the Welsh coast.
What Charles hasn't yet revealed is that the concert is set to be a reunion. Years before Herb's dwindling career as a solo artist, he was one half of a duo called McGwyer Mortimer. Until they split – and, we suspect, long after – he was deeply in love with his opposite number, Nell: a supporting role warmly graced by Carey Mulligan in a spirit of mucking in.
It's tricky to get off the island, as Herb finds when his host's jabberingly awkward wordplay drives him to mutiny. The film's simple proposition is that we never leave it, either.
We're stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can't read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment. There's almost nothing he won't turn into a weak pun: accused of prying, he dubs himself 'Pry-awatha', and calls Herb's rider a 'Winona'. Charles is also a widower, which explains a lot when he's listening to McGwyer Mortimer's love songs – the only times in the film when he's lost for words.
Key and Basden co-wrote this script, expanding on their 2007 short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island (which had the same director, James Griffiths). Together they've made something which stands comparison with the likes of Once or Sing Street, while gaining freshness from its silliness. Charles, who has a tennis court, has become such a loner he's a dab hand at serves, while useless at any other aspect of the game. Meanwhile, as one of few fellow islanders, Sian Clifford sweetly sketches a befuddled shop-owner who might have stumbled right in from Wallace and Gromit.
Herb and Charles, a man of few words and a man of too many, are recognisable to us as equally lost souls – kindred spirits in that way, if not exactly fast friends. (They're slow friends.) The film tackles stasis and being marooned, emotionally, at a certain time of life: rich themes the script doesn't need to talk about overtly, because the characters refuse to do so.
Deeply believable as a 00s music casualty, Basden's Herb is so slumped and blocked he's the perfect foil to Charles, who masks his own pain by twittering away on any subject but the ones that matter. Ninety per cent of the writing is bad jokes – performed so snugly in character, they're funnier than most good ones. 10 per cent is choked desolation, and very touching indeed.