Early in the handsomely mounted but stodgy romantic drama “My Policeman,” an older woman looks out the window of a cottage in a seaside village in the 1990s and sees her taciturn husband ambling back to the house. Cue the needle drop to the 1955 Empires doo-wop tune “Magic Mirror” as we dissolve to an image of that same man some 40 years earlier on a much sunnier day along the water in Brighton, England. Why, it’s almost as if there was a time when things seemed brighter, and the world was filled with possibility!
This type of heavy-handed treatment runs throughout “My Policeman,” from songs such as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” telling us when someone is well, you know, to the sprinkling of obvious visual clues in the production design, to the disappointingly thin and rote main characters, played by two different trios of actors in the alternating time periods. Despite the big-name allure of Harry Styles, the presence of such reliable veteran actors as Gina McKee and Rupert Everett, and the prestige-pedigree source material of a 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts that was inspired by the decades-long real-life relationship between the famed British novelist E.M. Forster and a policeman, this is a borderline dull affair.
For all the gorgeous visuals in Brighton and Venice, and the scandalous-for-its-time storyline about a married man carrying on a torrid love affair with another man when being gay was literally a crime, “My Policeman” never really resonates. There are times when the actors playing the main characters in the 1990s scenes seem so far removed from the actors playing those same characters in the 1950s, it’s as if we’re watching two separate movies.
The 1950s sequences follow the burgeoning, three-way friendship between schoolteacher Marion Taylor (Emma Corrin), policeman Tom Burgess (Harry Styles) and museum curator Patrick Hazelwood (David Dawson). Marion is in love with Tom, and they eventually become engaged and get married, but the signs are pretty obvious that Tom’s true affections lie with Patrick. By the time Patrick shows up during Marion’s and Tom’s honeymoon at Tom’s request, even a naïve schoolteacher in 1950s England should be able to figure out these two aren’t just pub pals.
We toggle back and forth between the 1950s, when the relationship between Tom and Patrick eventually results in scandal and shatters three lives, and the 1990s, when Patrick (now played by Rupert Everett) is recovering from a stroke and is invited to recuperate at the home of Marion (Gina McKee) and Tom (Linus Roache), who are still married. (It was Marion’s idea; Tom has no interest in reconnecting with the past.) We see a little bit of Corrin’s Marion in McKee’s interpretation of the same character, but neither Everett’s Patrick nor Roache’s Tom seems connected to the younger version of himself.
Even more troubling is the fact we get very few answers about what happened in the decades between the time periods. Marion and Tom remain married, but they apparently never had any children and seem profoundly unhappy; as for Patrick, did he ever find any measure of the peace and freedom he deserved, or has he been alone all this time?
We don’t know. “My Policeman” never takes us there.
