Wetherby (1985) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy) and Tuna

Scoop's notes in white:

Wetherby is the name of a nondescript and middle class English town which provides the backdrop for a mysterious whydunit. (It's a suicide, so we already know WHOdunit.)

Vanessa Redgrave plays an unfulfilled middle aged schoolmarm who hosts a small dinner party one evening. As the guests arrive, a stranger appears at the door, says he is John Morgan, and walks in to the dinner. They set an extra place for him. Nobody really knows whether someone else extended a kind invitation to this lost soul, but it turns out that he has simply invited himself.

John Morgan returns to the teacher's house the next morning, makes a little small talk, pulls a gun from his pocket, sticks it in his mouth, and calmly shoots himself.

And there is our whydunit premise. Why was John Morgan at that party? Why did he commit suicide? Why did he choose the teacher's home to make his farewell statement? The last question is especially intriguing to the police, because a suicide among strangers is totally uncharacteristic. Typically a suicide happens alone, or as a dramatic statement made in front of someone for a purpose, but not among random people. The police inspector tries to assemble the pieces of the puzzle, with only limited success, but we in the audience get a significant amount of additional insight when we see incidents from John Morgan's past, from the teacher's past, and from additional moments during the evening of the dinner party.

The solution to the puzzle is never really explicit, but the script maintains an appropriate feeling of ubiquitous portent throughout the story by the unspoken parts of the secret. The story thus stands apart from the type of mystery which functions logically and deductively. It is inductive, and oblique. It offers not solutions, but hints, suggestions, or working hypotheses. This technique is quite an intelligent way to present the unraveling, as if Harold Pinter had decided to take his elegant dialogue and sense of foreboding away from psychological dramas about the rich and write instead a mystery story about the educated middle class. The story did in fact have its origin on the London stage, albeit not in a play written by Pinter but one from David Hare, who adapted his own play into this screenplay and also directed the film.

Yes, very intelligent.

Intelligence, however, does not always make for a good film.

My take on it is this. If you want to see a true mystery story, you will really not care for this much at all. You will probably sit quietly during the closing credits and think, "am I supposed to understand the whydunits? I'm not sure that I do, even after all that." On the other hand, if you enjoy Pinter's plays, Nick Roeg's films, or other works which rely on the careful maintenance of tone to evoke a calculated emotional response from the audience, you'll find this to be a good example of the type. The cast is first-rate, headed by Ian Holm, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, and Vanessa Redgrave. Vanessa's look-alike daughter Joely shares her mother's part in the flashback scenes.

I don't especially enjoy watching Pinter's plays, and I could use most of Roeg's films as insomnia medicine, so I found Wetherby tedious, talky, very tough going, and devoid of true warmth. I can admire the quality of the dialogue and the acting; I can see how it has been carefully constructed to maintain a certain tone; and I can see why Roger Ebert felt it was worth four stars. Some of you will undoubtedly join Ebert in liking and admiring it. Having given a nod in that direction, let me hasten to add that I can be placed in the "admiring" column, but not the "liking".

I don't know how much of Pinter's or Hare's writing is meant to represent realistic characterization and how much is stagy artifice. I've always thought this sort of dialogue to be a contrivance necessary to evoke a certain audience response. Of course, the fact that I don't know any people who talk or think like these characters doesn't obviate the possibility that these portrayals do fairly represent a certain side of British life. I'm just glad I don't have to spend any time there. I didn't even feel that I wanted to spend the very little time with them encompassed by this movie. It may be a good film but frankly the vast majority of you would top off a viewing by questioning how anyone else could possibly like this.

Wetherby sports a stellar cast including Vanessa Redgrave and Judy Dench. The plot is simple enough. A stranger invites himself to a small dinner party at the home of spinster teacher Redgrave. The next day, he visits her, and blows his brains all over her wall. The rest of the film examines the question, "Why did he do it?" An assortment of characters all wonder why he did it, including Redgrave's lifelong friend (Dench), the friend's husband, a police investigator, and a rather strange female acquaintance of the deceased .

The question didn't struck me as a particularly interesting one to begin with, especially as I didn't know the character, but I didn't feel like I was any closer to an answer by the time the film ended. So, if the film didn't answer the question, "Why did he do it?", what question did the film answer? It wasn't until I started thinking about how on earth to review this that I found the real question, and point of the film. Either of two questions will get you there.

• Why did these characters want to know why he did it?
• Why were these characters included in the story?

The answer is the same in both cases. All of them are living unhappy lives, although they appear outwardly content with life. So the real question of the film isn't "Why did he do it?" but rather, "Why don't we do it?" Unfortunately, the film doesn't really answer that either. What is the value in this? Possibly, the film makers are asking us to look inside ourselves, and decide if we are or aren't happy, and figure out what keeps us going.

I feel a little better now that I see a reason for the film to exist, and it is now clear why I didn't relate to it at all. The basic assumption is that most of us are profoundly unhappy just under the surface. At least in my case, that is a totally false assumption.