Mark Reviews Movies: THE DUKE

The Duke, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 28, 2022

The story of The Duke almost seems too strange to be true. If it hadn't actually happened, someone eventually would have imagined and created the same tale by now. Come to think of it, since the whole affair went down in England, it's a bit of a surprise that the folks at Ealing Studios hadn't already dreamt up such a plot at the comedic height of their post-war period.

No, this story really happened—or happened as closely to this film's narrative as dramatic and comic necessities require—in 1961, when a very vocal but seemingly harmless working-class man, of an older but unknown age, stole what was, perhaps, the most famous painting in the whole of the United Kingdom at the time. Well, his argument was that he "borrowed" the painting, and whether or not that could hold up in court, there's little doubt that he believed his argument to be perfectly honest.

The painting in question is Francisco Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. The portrait of that beloved hero of Waterloo almost left its home in the National Gallery of London, but a sum of £140,000 from the government ensured that it would remain.

That's a lot of money to Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent, a naïvely sincere hoot), especially since it comes from honest, hard-working tax-payers like himself. "You don't pay taxes," retorts his wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren). She definitely knows as much, since she's the one who had to scrounge together a lot of bills and coins to pay for the BBC license fee that her husband refused to pay on principle and on account of a technicality (He removed the BBC receiver from the home TV, and if a television technically can't receive it, he technically shouldn't have to pay for it).

If that argument isn't going to work, here's another from Kempton: That money could have gone to a different cause that actually benefited people in need. Old-age pensioners and war veterans shouldn't have to pay that television fee, for example, and think of all those folks whose fees could have been covered by the money spent on the painting. Nobody really seems to care about that, according to Dorothy, except for him, and if he really wants to make a difference, Kempton should put in more of an effort to enact political change.

Obviously, the wife points out, Kempton doesn't have time for that. He just got out of prison (for previously not paying the BBC license), and he, Dorothy, and their younger son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead) can't get by on her pay as a cleaner and the son's occasional income from fixing up old boats. Kempton eventually does take a job, and there's a particularly funny moment when, during the first minutes of his employment, Kempton easily could be fired on the spot. He's working an industrial bakery, and the man is too busy speechifying to notice or care about all of the loaves of bread falling off the conveyor belt.

Anyway, there's an inherently amusing pattern to this character and his tale, as written by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. It's that of a generally decent and well-meaning person who is intentional in his aims but constantly finds himself suffering unintentional consequences—almost exclusively by way of talking himself into them. The big joke, perhaps, is that Kempton feels the need to talk himself over any obstacle, around any barrier, and out of any problem. Since it's the talking that gets him into so much trouble in the first place, there's only more and more trouble as a result.

The film, directed by the late Roger Michell, understands and takes advantage of this contradiction, which follows this talkative man in a situation that almost certainly would benefit from complete silence. After all of that talk about the tax-payer cost for the Goya painting and how that money could have gone elsewhere, Kempton apparently takes matters into his own hands.

After a surprisingly stealthy break-in at the National Gallery (with a couple of good gags within the montage of the faceless intruder, including a toilet being accidentally flushed and the robbery being reacted to by the most famous scream in art history), the painting is in the back bedroom of the Bunton house in Newcastle. Kempton's assertions that the painting is "not very good" and that the Duke's soldiers actually won his battles are reasonable-enough justifications in his mind.

The plan is to hold the painting for a sort of ransom, with the "sort of" meaning the money won't be for Kempton's personal benefit but for charity. The plot has Kempton and Jackie, who builds a false back behind which to hide the painting in a wardrobe, trying to evade the police, who assume the robbery was performed by international art thieves. More importantly, Kempton has to evade Dorothy, whose disappointment in her husband, as often as he receives it on account of his shenanigans, might be a greater punishment than anything the law could throw at him.

There's a real sweetness in that fear, just as there is in the entirety of this marital relationship. The two lost a daughter, who died in an accident, and while Kempton puts his self-blame into politics and writing plays, Dorothy refuses to talk about or express her grief in any way. If the film reaches, it's in trying to connect this mourning and the process of grieving to the robbery and its fallout, but nonetheless, the relationship feels authentic in its quiet comfort and its unspoken difficulties.

The whole of The Duke, in fact, is quite genial. It's a combination of situational humor, political commentary, and character study—all of it equally understated and clever, in that old-fashioned tradition of very-British comedy.

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