Agatha (1979)

Simply Perfect

Fantastic!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

An ingenious supposition of what happened to the writer Agatha Christie during the 11 days she disappeared in the 1920s. In this Michael Apted directed film, Christie checked into a British spa in pursuit of the woman her husband was having an affair with. Vanessa Redgrave plays Christie and Dustin Hoffman is an American reporter who is on to her. Hoffman is woefully miscast but Redgrave is brilliant, playing Christie as a neurotic introvert sorely lacking any self-esteem. What she does have is a very sinister imagination, which she puts to good use. The film is an exquisitely shot (by Vittorio Storaro no less) thriller with great production values & a first-rate supporting cast, including Timothy Dalton as Christie's callous husband. A flop when first released, this film is in dire need of rediscovery.

In December 1926, the queen of crime fiction, Agatha Christie, vanished for almost two weeks, provoking a massive manhunt and a frenzy of press activity (speculating that she had perhaps been murdered or committed suicide). To this day, the full truth of her peculiar disappearance remains a mystery. In this 1979 film from director Michael Apted – working from a script by Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft – a possible solution to the mystery is offered.The shy and insecure Agatha Christie (Vanessa Redgrave) is devastated when her husband Archibald (Timothy Dalton) declares that he no longer loves her and wants a divorce so that he can be free to marry his lover, secretary Nancy Neele (Celia Gregory). Initially reluctant to grant his wish, Agatha goes into an emotional meltdown… despite this, Archibald leaves her behind at the house and heads off to socialise elsewhere. Later, Agatha disappears suddenly following a car accident. The police and locals gather in huge numbers to search the surrounding countryside for clues, bewildered as to why she should vanish so completely in the wake of the crash. Has she wandered into the nearby marsh, dazed and confused, and drowned? Has she taken her own life? Has her husband murdered her and used the accident as a smokescreen to conceal his crime? In truth, Agatha has fled to a health spa in Harrogate where she has signed in under a false name, 'becoming' one Teresa Neele, a distant South African relative of her husband's illicit lover Nancy. Here she spends her days scribbling ideas in a small notebook – but what exactly is she planning? A new book? A suicide? Perhaps a revenge-murder? Besotted American journalist Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman) is determined to find Agatha. He tracks her down to the spa in Harrogate and, under a false name, woos her and finds himself falling in love. Can he get to the bottom of her tangled scheme and fragile psychological state before it's too late?Agatha is a good-looking film (courtesy, in no small part, of legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro). The 1920s period detail is immaculately captured in the impressive sets, styles and costumes. The mystery at the heart of the story is nicely handled overall, with the truth of Agatha's plan cleverly concealed almost all the way to the climax. At various stages it looks like she might be plotting to kill Nancy out of anger, to take her own life out of depression, or maybe even to humiliate her husband out of revenge. The dynamics of Agatha's state of mind and her intentions generate sufficient intrigue to keep viewer's guessing throughout. Where the film falls down somewhat is in the relationship between Agatha and the American journalist Wally Stanton. Redgrave and Hoffman are perfectly fine in the roles… but it's what draws them together, what makes them click as a couple, that never comes across as sufficiently developed or believable. The characters are not fleshed out fully enough to make the audience care, nor feel totally convinced, about their predicament. Nevertheless, this mysterious and intriguing real-life event provides a pretty good premise for a film. Yes, it has its flaws, but Agatha remains an interesting and reasonably well-made film, certainly worth 100 minutes of anybody's time.

I am not normally a great fan of films which offer a purported solution to a real-life mystery. I found David Fincher's recent "Zodiac", about a real-life serial killer who terrorised San Francisco during the sixties and seventies, dull, and did not like the way in which it reversed the presumption of innocence by proclaiming that the killer was a real (although conveniently dead) individual who was suspected of the crimes but never put on trial. Then we have all those attempts to answer old chestnuts like "Who was Jack the Ripper?" and "What is the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy?", films which are generally longer on speculation than on fact and which rarely shed much light on the mysteries in question."Agatha" is another film of this type. It revolves around the disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie for eleven days in December 1926; she disappeared from her Berkshire home and was later found staying under an assumed name in a hotel in the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. The affair gave rise to a frenzy of media speculation at the time, and Christie never said what she had been doing during those eleven days or offered an explanation for her disappearance. The fictitious explanation offered by the film is that Christie, who had just discovered that her husband Archibald was having an affair, went to Harrogate in order to commit suicide but was prevented from doing so by Wally Stanton, a (presumably) fictitious American journalist who befriended her.The best thing about the film is its lavish recreation of 1920s Britain, but I found it had little else to offer. Neither of its stars, Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, seem to be stretched by their material. What surprises me is why the producers should have felt that this particular story was worthy of being made into a film. As a romance? There is some mild flirtation between Agatha and Wally, but this is kept very low-key. As a thriller? Hardly. When the film was shown in cinemas in 1979 Agatha Christie had died only three years earlier at the age of eighty-five. Most of the audience, therefore, would have been well aware that, whatever might have happened to her in Harrogate, she had not come to any serious harm, and there would consequently have been little suspense.The question the film raises is not so much "What happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" but rather "Does anyone still care what happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" At least the Ripper murders and the Kennedy assassination, to judge by the multitude of books and websites devoted to them, still arouse plenty of controversy today. There is no such interest in the Christie disappearance, which was in all likelihood the result of emotional stress consequent upon the breakdown of her marriage. This film is not so much a puzzle without a solution as a solution without a puzzle. 4/10

Go, instead, for the gorgeous theme music by Johnny Mandel (Emily, The Shadow of your Smile -theme from "The Sandpiper"-, A Time For Love,) which Paul Willians put words to after they titled it "Close Enough for Love." It has become a jazz standard and has been recorded by every worthwhile artist playing or singing jazz. It's one of Johnny Mandel's best efforts, and that's saying a LOT! Stan Getz has a very nice version (instumental, of course.) The lyrics are some of Paul Williams' best. Starts out, "You and I, an un-matched pair..." Not perfect, no, but "close enough, for love." Bittersweet words... I thought the music, alone was well worth the price of admission. I rented the movie as soon as it came out on VHS (this was 28 years ago(!), and made an audio cassette of the theme so I could learn to play it. Songs that good don't come along very often...