‘Brutally unfunny.” “Lacking in charm and good jokes.” “As interminable as it is revolting.” The reviews have not been kind to The Nan Movie, which stairlifts Catherine Tate’s alter ego to the dizzy heights of the big screen. The film finds Nan – aka Joanie Taylor – road-tripping to Ireland with grandson Jamie (Mathew Horne) to visit her dying long-lost sister. Spliced into this story are flashbacks to the second world war, when Joanie and Nell (Katherine Parkinson) courted, and fell out over, the same GI – which explains, apparently, the embittered geriatric the character has since become.
The most interesting thing about the film is probably its production history. Plan A, according to recent reports, was that it focus on the wartime backstory which, as it survives in the released film, is told in a totally different, more dramatic register than the broad comedy of present-day Nan. Somewhere along the line, the road-trip framing device spread across the whole movie. That’s a shame – for viewers, because the two strands (and the two versions of Nan/Joanie) feel very mismatched, and for Tate, whose original concept (if those reports are true) represented a more interesting answer to the question: what to do with Nan next?
