The Ballad of Wallis Island: Rhapsodic

The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for brief profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

You just can’t beat our cousins across the pond, when it comes to quirky dramedies.

 

This one comes from the inventive minds of co-writers Tom Basden and Tim Key, who also play the two leading roles. They’ve expanded their BAFTA-nominated 2007 short — The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island — into this even more beguiling feature-length film.

 

Seeking a way to bridge the awkwardness still present between them, Herb (Tom Basden,
left) encourages Nell (Carey Mulligan) and Charles (Tim Key) to make sky lanterns,
and set them aloft with a private wish.

The premise is hilarious, the execution note-perfect, and the unusually isolated setting an important character in its own right.

The story begins as international music superstar Herb McGwyer (Basden), having agreed to do a private gig on a remote island off the Welsh coast, arrives just off-shore his destination ... following a long trip in a small motorboat. Baffled by the absence of a dock, faced with having to wade the rest of the way, Herb makes matters worse by falling out of the boat and getting thoroughly drenched.

 

He's nonetheless greeted enthusiastically by his host, Charles Heath (Key), who compounds Herb’s perplexity with a ceaseless barrage of apologies, words of adulation, non-sequiturs, poor attempts at humor, and otherwise meaningless idle chatter. (Prepare yourself for a barrage of bad puns.)

 

Herb is further annoyed/confused to discover that they need to walk the several miles to the opulent hotel where he’ll stay ... which happens to be Charles’ home.

 

Its architectural opulence — compounded by touches of whimsy — is breathtaking. (It’s actually Derwydd Mansion, a Tudor-style property dating back to the 15th century.)

 

The décor is period by way of the occasionally bizarre, decorated by somebody with far more money than taste. Kudos to production designer Alexandra Toomey and her team, who filled the vast spaces with items sourced from antique marts and trunk sales.

 

Along the way, Herb has tried repeatedly to get details about where he’ll perform, and for how many people, and so forth. Charles curiously deflects all such questions, until Herb — understandably — finally gets a bit frosty.

 

Turns out that Charles — more than a little eccentric, and a massive fan-boy — is a millionaire many times over, having won the national lottery twice. This allowed him to fill his home with every bit of McGwyer memorabilia he could find, and buy himself the ultimate fan collectible: a concert. For one person. Himself.

Young Woman and the Sea: Goes for the gold

Young Woman and the Sea (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for dramatic intensity and partial nudity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.2.24

Inspirational sports movies don’t come much better than this one.

 

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning has swum similar fact-based waters before, with 2012’s rugged and equally compelling Kon-Tiki. But this new film has a sparkling buoyance courtesy of its strongest asset: an effervescent and thoroughly persuasive performance by star Daisy Ridley. She’s radiant.

 

Dinners in the Eberle household often are a boisterous affair: from left, Henry Jr.
(Ethan Rouse), Henry (Kim Bodnia), Gertrude (Jeanette Hain), Trudy (Daisy Ridley)
and Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey).

Jeff Nathanson’s script, adapted from Glenn Stout’s 2009 non-fiction book of the same title, massages a few minor details but is rigorously authentic with respect to the significant events of Trudy Ederle’s life and career. Indeed, she became so astonishingly famous, for her time, that it’s incomprehensible that obscurity claimed her until only recently.

(In a recent article for the London Daily Telegraph, journalist Simon Briggs cheekily compares her to champion racehorse Seabiscuit, who in the late 1930s was just as celebrated as Ederle had been in the 1920s ... but similarly vanished from the historical record until being profiled in Laura Hillenbrand’s sensational 1999 best-seller, which in turn prompted a 2003 film.)

 

Rønning’s film opens in 1910, in a German neighborhood in Manhattan, New York. Five-year-old Trudy (Olive Abercrombie) unexpectedly survives a bout with measles: an illness that coincides with the PS General Slocum steamboat tragedy, which caught fire and sank in the East River, killing 1,021 people. Most were women and children, who remained on the boat because they couldn’t swim, and were terrified of the water.

 

(This steamboat disaster actually occurred in June 1904, which doesn’t quite fit Nathanson’s timeline ... but it serves a substantial dramatic purpose.)

 

Galvanized by the thought of so many needless deaths, Trudy’s severe yet caring mother, Gertrude (a warm and richly nuanced performance by Jeanette Hain), resolves that her children will learn how to swim. All of her children, which includes Trudy’s older sister Meg (Lilly Aspell), at a time when the mere thought of women — of any age — in the water, was considered laughable and/or scandalous.

 

This view is shared by the girls’ stubborn father, Henry (Kim Bodnia), a butcher with old-country sensibilities and a firm believer in rules, who abjectly refuses this plan. Trudy’s hilarious ploy to wear him down involves a popular period foxtrot song that becomes a mantra throughout this film (and an ear-worm that I’ve yet to shake, days later).