At the Sunday Times literary awards, Richard E Grant shocked a few people by referring, in his short guest speech, to the “fucking” producer who had made life difficult for him on his directorial debut, Wah-Wah. Grant’s book of the making of the film, The Wah-Wah Diaries, is also less than complimentary about such people, and it’s clear that getting the film made and released was a labour of love that required much patience and persistence.
Wah-Wah certainly feels like a labour of love, or at least a movie that Grant felt driven to make, perhaps in exorcism of long-ago demons. It is avowedly autobiographical, though also thoroughly fictionalised. The basic story is there: the break-up of Grant’s parents and subsequent events in Swaziland, where his father was an education official, in the years leading up to the country’s achievement of independence from Britain in 1968.
Grant has also spoken frankly about the elements of his youthful story that have been changed to make it more workable as a feature film. He compressed the timespan, left out his brother altogether, and so forth. All this is quite permissible; after all, what’s important here is not precisely what did or didn’t happen in Grant’s family at the time, but whether the acknowledged fiction of Wah-Wah makes a good movie.
It’s hard not to compare it to The Squid and the Whale, another recent movie about children dealing with a parental split. The humour in Wah-Wah lacks the bitter tang of the humour in The Squid and the Whale, where it is embedded in the sad situation. In Wah-Wah, by comparison, which has many very funny moments, the comedy and the sadness run in parallel, never quite converging. Whether you see that as effective counterpoint or an oddly schizophrenic tone will depend on your taste.
The laughs in Wah-Wah arise largely from the hopelessly anachronistic Brits populating the colony, and the movie takes a satirical line in dealing with their pretensions, their racism and their hypocrisies. Lady Riva (Celia Imrie), in particular, is mercilessly sent up, and one wonders if we aren’t heading for stereotype country, but Julie Walters also provides a character in whom humour and sympathy are more evenly mixed. (The title, by the way, has nothing to do with the guitar pedal favoured by Jimi Hendrix, but echoes the way the British expats speak, as in “blah blah blah”.)
Ralph Compton is the central character and Grant-figure; he is played, early on, by Zac Fox, but mostly by Nicholas Hoult. The latter gives a lovely, sensitive performance as poor Ralph, who has to deal with his heavy-drinking dad (a brilliant Gabriel Byrne) and his flighty, unfaithful mother (Miranda Richardson), who leaves Ralph feeling distinctly abandoned — and later makes it worse. There is a scene, midway through the movie, in which Ralph runs off from his recently returned mother after a roadside conversation; she rushes back to the homestead, shouting to her ex-husband: “I’ve lost Ralph!” Yes, he replies coldly; you have indeed. In a few words, that scene crystallises the movie’s sense of tragedy and overwhelming loss.
But soon we are back on the comic track, as the local colonials put on a production of Camelot, and Wah-Wah lurches between laughs and tears, finally ending on a maudlin note. It has many pleasures, though, besides those already mentioned: for one, seeing Emily Watson (as the father’s new love, American and iconoclastic) in a joyous, feisty role after her rather dreary turn in Separate Lies. Certainly, despite its flaws, Wah-Wah has enough life, energy and feeling to draw one in and keep one avidly watching.