I watched this at the Capri Theater, an 85-year old movie house in Montgomery, Alabama that is positioned, for fund-raising purposes, as a sort of community arts organization. Montgomery is a town with two private Christian colleges and dozens (hundreds?) of churches the students at those colleges aspire to lead, so local arts organizations have a desperately straight line to toe. They can neither challenge the audience with dangerous art or disappoint the arts community with trash cinema. It’s no wonder, then, that they routinely program nonthreatening Masterpiece Theatre fare like this for the benefit of those who write the checks.
The Choral is a technically competent exposition of small-town English charm from the good times before the colonials turned on the metropole and everything went bad. Sure, some of the boys are off losing their arms in Flanders, but the little choral society at the heart of the film gets on with it in style and somehow ends up better than they started, transformed from a troupe of sleepy passion play performers led by a doughy middle-class pianist into an avant-garde operatic society led by a capital-A Artist named Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes)* who shapes Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius into an impassioned anti-war opera. It’s unfortunate that Hytner lavishes more attention on an awkward handjob scene between local girl Bella Holmes (Emily Fairn) and maimed veteran/tenor Clyde (Jacob Dudman) than the significant artistic process which must have unfolded to make this transition happen, but films about the artistic process rarely succeed.
Neither does this film succeed. Not anti-war, anti-class, pro-history, or pro-art, it simply moves from beat to beat, from one implied sexual tension to another, until the performance finally happens and the credits roll. I left the cinema feeling nothing about the war, about Yorkshire in the last century, Elgar, or Bach, or beautiful little British people, or the mill in their beautiful little British town, or anything at all.
Kudos to the Capri Theater for bringing more people out to see this on a Friday night than I have seen at any screening at the local AMC megaplexes in recent months. PBS knows something the art snobs don’t understand, but Capri gets it. Downton Abbey and The Choral and all the other costume pabulum that British taxpayer funds can throw at the screen have absolutely nothing to say – and that’s what people want. Cheerio.
* There is a chicken restaurant in my part of the South called Guthries, where you can get a box of chicken tenders, seasoned french fries, coleslaw, and garlic toast. Most people forego the slaw in favor of double fries, but not me. We–that is, me and at least two friends–call these things “Gut Boxes.” So, unfortunately, every time someone spoke to “Dr. Guthrie,” visions of Gut Boxes danced through my head like golden-brown sugarplums. The viewer brings to the film what they will.
C.B. Crenshaw 