There are, generally speaking, two types of biopics. First, there are those that seek to affirm the myth of their subject. (A handful of recent examples: Elvis; King Richard; Being the Ricardos.) On the other side, we have those that look to deconstruct that myth. (Blonde; Spencer; Priscilla.) Archie, ITV’s new serialised biopic of Cary Grant, throws its chips purposefully into the latter category. This isn’t the Cary Grant fans know and love. He doesn’t even sound like the Cary Grant they know. But in tearing down one image, the show never manages to construct a convincing alternative.
The series begins with a voiceover, as Jason Isaacs’ Archie – short for the star’s real name Archibald Leach – explains, in a plummy British tenor, that “Cary Grant” is simply a character he’s spent his whole career inhabiting. The real Archie, far from the effortlessly debonair leading man of films such as His Girl Friday, An Affair to Remember and North by Northwest, is lonely and insecure. “I made up the perfect man in order to survive,” he says.
We first meet Leach/Grant in the late 1980s, when he’s embarking on a series of in-person theatre talks, A Conversation with Cary Grant. It was during this tour that Grant would eventually die, of a stroke at the age of 82. As the series crawls towards this endpoint, it flashes back at length to scenes from earlier in Grant’s life – including his traumatic childhood, rendered as a kind of rubbery melodrama. One of the moments Archie returns to is the actor’s courtship of Heaven Can Wait star Dyan Cannon (Laura Aikman), some 30 years his junior. (Cannon, who would become the fourth of Grant’s five wives, is an executive producer on the series.)
By framing so much of Archie around the end of Grant’s life, the series takes on the kind of sombre, almost eulogistic tone of something like Stan & Ollie, the 2018 Laurel and Hardy biopic. Both of these projects know that recapturing their subjects’ unique onscreen magic would be too big of a task – so instead they opt for the achievable: the faded glory, the afterglow.
Stan & Ollie at least had the benefit of John C Reilly’s breathtaking Oliver Hardy facsimile. Fans of Grant may struggle to recognise the actor in the haunted, faltering figure Isaac inhabits. I suppose this is the point, to a large extent. But Isaacs’ disarmingly British version of Archie never really feels real, either. This may be down to the writing – laboured jokes and trite drama mark this as a script the real Grant would have surely scrapheaped. Maybe Isaacs, making big and unexpected choices, has to shoulder some of the blame. But whatever the reason, Archie is an affair to forget.
