Britain’s premier literary throuple is the subject of this gamey, borderline-silly but watchably acted movie, which might have sat more comfortably as a three-part Sunday night TV drama. Robert Graves (Tom Hughes) is the poet traumatised and creatively blocked by his experiences in the great war, Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) is his forward-thinking feminist wife, and Laura Riding (Dianna Agron) is the charismatic American writer who comes to live with them in a scandalous menage.
Laura entrances them both sexually and stirs Robert’s stagnant juices in every sense, leading him to invent an entire pagan aesthetic around his adoration for her as the “goddess” at the centre of his poetic being – with Nancy’s slightly wan permission. But Riding’s irreverent lustiness is to infuriate the fusty male circles of literary London, particularly TS Eliot (Christien Anholt) who is portrayed, perhaps justly, as an obnoxious hypocrite and bore.
Movies about poets are always in danger of being precious, but here the preciousness is offset by a certain combination of eroticism and creepiness, particularly in regard to Riding herself who is not just the disrupter and life-force inspiration that everyone needed, but is also a predator and parasite; she has an unexpectedly disquieting scene with Robert and Nancy’s daughter. There are some cliches here; this film, for example, conforms to the time-honoured tradition that a man and a woman painting a room must always wind up impishly sploshing paint all over each other.
Then then there is the difficulty of the key scene in which Laura falls quasi-suicidally from a high window at the climax of a group argument and Robert rather absurdly ends up following suit, throwing himself from another window in some bizarre gesture of solidarity with her – or even from a muddled need to end it all and avoid the consequences. The movie fudges the potentially ridiculous moment in which Graves does his own swan-dive; it is non-fatal, like Laura’s. An entertaining melodrama with probably more jazz age decadence than Graves would have recognised.
• The Laureate is released on 5 May in UK and Irish cinemas.
