Wednesday May 6 at 4:00 and 7:00pm
A British historical drama set in 1916, during World War I, in the fictional town of Ramsden, Yorkshire. The film follows the members of the local choral society which recruits a disparate group of townspeople for a performance of Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, a work chosen because it was not written by a German.
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“God Save the King” has never been the loveliest or most melodic of national anthems, and its somewhat chiding, aggressive tenor is brought to the fore early in “The Choral.” Upon delivery of some good news from the front in the grim midst of the First World War, an English village choir’s lusty, spontaneous rendition of the song disrupts their rather shabbier rehearsal of Edward Elgar’s complex, haunting oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius,” prompting refined choirmaster Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) to roll his eyes to the back of his head. “If only you sang Elgar with the confidence you sing the national anthem,” he mutters. Art counts for a lot more than patriotism to Guthrie, and the happy surprise of Nicholas Hytner‘s film — despite its twee, veddy English trappings — is that it largely takes his side.
Perhaps that’s not such a surprise. “The Choral” is, after all, the first original screenplay in over 40 years by Alan Bennett, a 91-year-old national treasure whose place in the British cultural firmament has never been tidily defined: A queer, agnostic, working-class Northerner, he’s a staunch royalist who declined a knighthood, and whose politics have traveled along a spectrum he once described as “conservative socialism.” Many of those contrasts and conflicts are present in “The Choral” — some for better, some for worse, but quite interestingly in all cases — even if Hytner, the director who previously filmed Bennett’s scripts for “The Madness of King George,” “The History Boys” and “The Lady in the Van,” gives the overall package a deceptively buttery gloss of tea-and-crumpets nostalgia.