I am not normally a great fan of films which offer a purported solution to a real-life mystery. I found David Fincher's recent "Zodiac", about a real-life serial killer who terrorised San Francisco during the sixties and seventies, dull, and did not like the way in which it reversed the presumption of innocence by proclaiming that the killer was a real (although conveniently dead) individual who was suspected of the crimes but never put on trial. Then we have all those attempts to answer old chestnuts like "Who was Jack the Ripper?" and "What is the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy?", films which are generally longer on speculation than on fact and which rarely shed much light on the mysteries in question.
"Agatha" is another film of this type. It revolves around the disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie for eleven days in December 1926; she disappeared from her Berkshire home and was later found staying under an assumed name in a hotel in the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. The affair gave rise to a frenzy of media speculation at the time, and Christie never said what she had been doing during those eleven days or offered an explanation for her disappearance. The fictitious explanation offered by the film is that Christie, who had just discovered that her husband Archibald was having an affair, went to Harrogate in order to commit suicide but was prevented from doing so by Wally Stanton, a (presumably) fictitious American journalist who befriended her.
The best thing about the film is its lavish recreation of 1920s Britain, but I found it had little else to offer. Neither of its stars, Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, seem to be stretched by their material. What surprises me is why the producers should have felt that this particular story was worthy of being made into a film. As a romance? There is some mild flirtation between Agatha and Wally, but this is kept very low-key. As a thriller? Hardly. When the film was shown in cinemas in 1979 Agatha Christie had died only three years earlier at the age of eighty-five. Most of the audience, therefore, would have been well aware that, whatever might have happened to her in Harrogate, she had not come to any serious harm, and there would consequently have been little suspense.
The question the film raises is not so much "What happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" but rather "Does anyone still care what happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" At least the Ripper murders and the Kennedy assassination, to judge by the multitude of books and websites devoted to them, still arouse plenty of controversy today. There is no such interest in the Christie disappearance, which was in all likelihood the result of emotional stress consequent upon the breakdown of her marriage. This film is not so much a puzzle without a solution as a solution without a puzzle. 4/10
"Agatha" is another film of this type. It revolves around the disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie for eleven days in December 1926; she disappeared from her Berkshire home and was later found staying under an assumed name in a hotel in the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. The affair gave rise to a frenzy of media speculation at the time, and Christie never said what she had been doing during those eleven days or offered an explanation for her disappearance. The fictitious explanation offered by the film is that Christie, who had just discovered that her husband Archibald was having an affair, went to Harrogate in order to commit suicide but was prevented from doing so by Wally Stanton, a (presumably) fictitious American journalist who befriended her.
The best thing about the film is its lavish recreation of 1920s Britain, but I found it had little else to offer. Neither of its stars, Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, seem to be stretched by their material. What surprises me is why the producers should have felt that this particular story was worthy of being made into a film. As a romance? There is some mild flirtation between Agatha and Wally, but this is kept very low-key. As a thriller? Hardly. When the film was shown in cinemas in 1979 Agatha Christie had died only three years earlier at the age of eighty-five. Most of the audience, therefore, would have been well aware that, whatever might have happened to her in Harrogate, she had not come to any serious harm, and there would consequently have been little suspense.
The question the film raises is not so much "What happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" but rather "Does anyone still care what happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" At least the Ripper murders and the Kennedy assassination, to judge by the multitude of books and websites devoted to them, still arouse plenty of controversy today. There is no such interest in the Christie disappearance, which was in all likelihood the result of emotional stress consequent upon the breakdown of her marriage. This film is not so much a puzzle without a solution as a solution without a puzzle. 4/10