Film review: ‘The Choral’

‘The Choral’

Directed by Nicholas Hytner (R)

★★

The new period screen drama starring Ralph Fiennes is at its best “when it chafes quietly against our expectations of gentle British comfort viewing,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. In a small Yorkshire mill town, young men are shipping off to World War I’s battlefields and returning broken “if at all” when an outsider played by Fiennes is hired as the local church’s new choirmaster. But while director Nicholas Hytner bathes the proceedings in “a buttery gloss of tea-and-crumpets nostalgia,” screenwriter Alan Bennett, who was also Hytner’s partner for 1994’s The Madness of King George, ensures that the film “doesn’t culminate in the against-the-odds artistic triumph you might expect.” The story honors art more honestly and proves “never less than diverting.”

To me, The Choral widely misses its mark, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. The rebuilt choir’s “scrappy, working-class, aurally iffy Brits” are “supposed to find healing, togetherness, and compassion through the power of music.” But Bennett’s script fails to even convince us that Fiennes’ Dr. Henry Guthrie teaches them anything, and the rest is “a cacophony of half-baked characters and rushed ideas that leaves you puzzled and unsatisfied.” So see the movie without trying to guess where it’s going, said Glenn Kenny in The New York Times. Sure, once Guthrie begins recruiting singers, his great find is a talented Black singer “beautifully played” by Amara Okereke. Past that discovery, though, the story’s dramatic swings turn out to be “gripping and unpredictable.” What’s more, “the film’s final shot will kick your heart into your throat.”