Not quite movie of the week
Daniel, Frank and Laurence are three long- time chums, though it’s hard to see what they have in common except that they all seem to be having a permanent bad-hair day. Daniel is a high-flying record executive, Frank is a struggling actor, and Laurence gives bridge lessons to middle-aged ladies while making the odd charcoal sketch in his spare time. Via a series of coincidences worthy of a Shakespearean comedy, these three examples of British masculinity all fall in love with the same woman, an American traveller named Martha.
The Very Thought of You is a fairly engaging romantic romp, carried over its plot-holes (you try to work out the business of the airline tickets in the beginning without ending up with an extra ticket) by fine performances from its three male leads.
Tom Hollander, last seen camping it up in Bedrooms and Hallways, makes Daniel an amusingly petulant egomaniac wildly pulling all the strings he can, but unable to understand why Martha doesn’t just tumble into his lap. Rufus Sewell’s Frank is the very image of an actor possessed of a certain raddled charm but fraught with self-doubt, still trying to live down his success as a child star and harbouring a certain resentment toward his more successful friends. Joseph Fiennes, whose Laurence is the least caricatured persona here and thus the hardest to pin down, unfailingly displays the fine-tuned comic talent that made his performance in Shakespeare in Love so entrancing.
Monica Potter plays the three-way love interest winningly, though she can’t quite bear the weight of all this obsessive devotion. She comes most sparklingly to life in the scenes with the amorous but slightly bewildered Laurence, especially when she’s trying to assert herself. She would have been brilliant had the role been less passive.
The movie is nicely framed by Laurence’s tormented outpourings to a neighbour, in which the story doubles back on itself a couple of times to fill in the gaps, thereby revising what we have hitherto come to understand about this tangled situation. Peter Morgan’s script is skilfully structured, but falls short on attention to detail. If only he’d taken greater pains with the niggly particulars, and worked a little harder at the humour, The Very Thought of You would be more than the diverting but disposable frolic it is.