Review of Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) by Markb. — 25 Feb 2006

The title character is a recently widowed British septugenarian (Judi Dench) who forms a prickly but mutually beneficial partnership with a producer (Bob Hoskins) to run a theatrical vaudeville revue, spicing up both the show and its box office receipts with copious female nudity (apparently permissable onstage at the time as long as the nudes remain PERFECTLY STILL).

Then World War II breaks out, the program becomes not only a major hit but a huge morale-booster for the boys in uniform on both sides of the pond, and you can probably guess at least some of the rest.

You also don't need a crystal ball to assume before seeing this that it's the latest example of the Brits Doing Naughty Things (But Don't Worry, It's For A Really, Really Good Reason) subgenre of filmmaking, which also includes Calendar Girls, Saving Grace, Waking Ned Devine and its pioneer and greatest example, 1997's wonderfully endearing The Full Monty.

Equally predictable is that this, like most of the above-listed films, is snugly but cagily tailored to the same middlebrow audience that recently gave Barry Manilow his first Number One CD since CDs were invented, thus causing normally nonreligious music writers and columnists to write about Armageddon.

More genuinely surprising is that Mrs. Henderson Presents is not only the work of edgy director Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity, The Grifters) but by far his most conventional and sentimental movie to date.

All of the above observations sound like complaints but aren't for one simple reason: it all works. Hoskins and Dench (who received a Best Actress Oscar momination that she probably won't win unless the Witherspoon/ Huffman vote splits squarely down the middle) are a comic dream team: their classic love-hate business (and occasionally personal) relationship may be the kind you only see in the movies, but rarely is it this much fun to watch.

Lots of period charm and flavor and some hilarious sequences dealing with the introduction of nudity to the production (and the typically squeamish censorial reactions to it) add to the pleasure, and even when the war strikes home and the movie goes all serious and stiff-upper-lip it takes some genuinely unexpected turns, especially in its observations of how men of all nationalities and time periods view and treat women.

(I wasn't expecting to draw even a subtle relationship between the Last Good War military audience here and the Vietnam USO show one in Apocalypse Now, but it's there.) Frears's most interesting artistic decision is to represent the London Blitz with file footage during the show and then switch to a realistic depiction when a personal price is paid; this is effective because he's showing the war having a real, irreversible effect on its characters after being more or less an abstract disturbance.