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16 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"It's all just a lot of Wah-Wah", 19 Nov 2006
There's a lot of drunken and shrill shrieking and wailing in Wah-Wah, Richard E. Grant's strangely titled movie about the British Diplomatic core in 1960s Swaziland -- the last British colonial holdout in Africa. Gravitating between whimsy and dysfunction and perhaps combining both, this rather slow moving melodrama tells the story of Ralf Compton (played as a preteen by Zachary Fox and later by Nicholas Hoult) who is forced into a corner by his dysfunctional parents Lauren (Miranda Richardson) and Harry (Gabriel Byrne).
Lauren has been having an affair and she can't stand the boozy Harry, neither can she stand living in this isolated outpost. Ralph clearly loves his mum and despite her carrying on, the affection seems more or less mutual, but she doesn't love him enough to stay. Working as the minister of education, Harry's a nice guy when he's sober, but his wife's infidelity and fears about his post-colonial job prospects make him an impossibly mean drunk.
After Lauren runs off with her lover, Harry gets worse. For the good of all concerned, the resentful Ralph is shipped off to boarding school. A few years later Ralph returns and salvation comes in the form of Ruby (Emily Watson) a brash and trashy American airline hostess, whom Harry failed to tell Ralph that he married. After a shaky start, Ruby and Ralph eventually hit it off; she's determined to connect with her reluctant and unenthusiastic stepson.
Ruby's clever impropriety and her distain for all the colonial stuffiness she sees around her, spawn the film's title, her term for silly-sounding English turns of phrase like toodly pip, to Ruby "it's all just a bunch of Wah-Wah. Ruby eventually becomes Ralph's best ally against the madness - of which more is to come. Harry's drinking increases and he goes on blinding rages, Lauren comes back, Harry gets the part of Sir Lancelot in the local production of Camelot, and all are anxious to celebrate the arrival of Princess Anne and the country's impending independence.
As Ralf and Ruby stick it to the pretentious colonial gentry and the political turmoil begins to sway around them, everyone else amuses himself or herself by taking tea on the veranda, drinking to excess, having affairs, and joining the musical theater troupe - everything is all very plumy and stiff-upper-lip British. The acting is uniformly strong - Byrne, Richardson and Watson are all lovely to watch, with Julie Walters doing a nice supporting turn as long-suffering neighbor Gwen, whose husband has absconded with Lauren.
There's some gorgeous scenery in Wah-Wah, the whole movie is constantly bathed in vibrant and rich colours, with Grant really nailing the late 1960's period detail, and you really get a sense of how silly these ex-pat colonialists were, as they tried desperately to hold on to their Anglo ways.
The main problem with Wah-Wah is the definitive lack of story definition - there isn't enough heft to the story to pull everything together. Watching it is like trying to accumulate a riddle that's missing its pieces: You can see the outline of a story, and some shapes fit neatly together - family dysfunction, adultery, the effects of alcoholism and political volatility - but there are undeniable holes.
Characters keep appearing and disappearing with reason or much explanation and the movie ends up a bit of a mish-mash, constantly going around in circles, with an ending that, while fortuitous and sad, seems to be hurriedly tacked on as though it's an after-thought. Mike Leonard November 06.
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