Mark Reviews Movies: JUDY & PUNCH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 4, 2020

The town of Seaside is a backwards place. First, there's the unsuitable name. An opening title informs us that Seaside is "located somewhere in the countryside," with the parenthetical detail that the location is "nowhere near the sea." A description of the main setting of Judy & Punch probably doesn't need to go any further than that contradiction.

For the curious, though, this is a place of deeply rooted superstition. The story's time period is unspecified, although we must assume it's set at some point during the Industrial Revolution, given the references to a major city as "Big Smoke." The actual era doesn't really matter, anyway. This town seems to be stuck in the Middle Ages.

Writer/director Mirrah Foulkes' movie opens with a young girl in a cloak running through Seaside and, as a consequence, giving us a tour of the place. The people are sickly or drunk or fighting or all of those things and more. A preacher in the market scolds about heretics and promotes a forthcoming stoning of witches. Two men brawl in an alley with no one caring to break it up or figure out what the fight's cause. Sex workers hang out outside, and one even tries to solicit the kid—probably as a joke but maybe not, if the kid were to ask a price.

The main escape for this squalor and misery—beyond the routine stonings of "sorcerers," "witches," and "heretics"—is the local theater. The big show features puppets, performed by Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) and his wife Judy (Mia Wasikowska). The names should be familiar. "Punch and Judy" is a centuries' old storytelling tradition in puppetry. The story is broad enough for some creative license, but the show better have the basics: a man named Punch, his wife Judy, a cop, and some ultimate foe, such as a ghost or a crocodile or the Devil himself. Punch punches and otherwise beats his way through these other characters, until there's no one left to fight.

From the start, Foulkes' screenplay is fascinating in the way it sees this art form as a reflection of life and simultaneously holds up a mirror to that reflection. We're first introduced to Judy and Punch—the people, not the puppets—by way of Punch and Judy—the puppets, not the people. Professor Punch puts on his show, as his puppet character beats Judy's puppet (Judy is clearly the more skilled puppeteer, manipulating her marionette to do multiple flips across the stage) and, as tradition dictates, proceeds to fight as many other puppets as possible.

Through the performance and especially afterwards, we get a pretty solid idea of the puppeteers' relationship. Punch has to be the star, and in the way he dominates the curtain call, sending his wife flying into the proscenium arch, his capacity for casual violence and the way he's witless about its consequences are obvious. Punch drinks to excess, philanders without hiding it, and tosses the couple's baby into the air without any consideration for the child's crying.

The daring aspect of the movie's portrayal of this domestic strife is the way Foulkes plays it in a comedic fashion. Herriman's performance is intentionally over-the-top in playing the character's drunken aloofness and transparently shallow promise-making, as well as his selfish disregard for everything and everyone else but his own ambitions and himself. The score is bouncy, matching the sometimes manic pacing of the action. The first act's climax has an increasingly irritated Punch forgoing the bottle, chasing the dog around the couple's manor (because the canine stole his sausages), being easily convinced of having more than a few drinks, and repeating the process again.

That tone drops suddenly—with an image that's played as a sight gag but is too horrific to be a joke—as the terrible reality of Punch's selfish and violent nature emerges. Unfortunately, so, too, does Foulkes' confident command and merging of story, tone, and theme fall. The remainder of the plot, which has a beaten-near-death Judy building up to revenge against her monstrous and murderous husband, never quite finds the strength, momentum, consistency, and ironic melding of tone and material that's so prevalent in the first act.

The narrative splits in two, with Judy (played with rising righteous fury by Wasikowska) recovering in a woodland camp, filled with accused "heretics," and Punch shifting the suspicion of his crimes to his household's elderly servants (played by Terry Norris and Brenda Palmer). The former section is played straight, as Judy learns how unjustly these outsiders have been treated by the backwards town. The latter maintains the sense of dark comedy, as the town rushes for hangings (which aren't as fun as stoning, one townsperson laments) against the insistence for due process from the village's new, naïve, and useless constable (played by Benedict Hardie).

Essentially, a story about the relationship between life and art, told in a boldly subversive and pointedly critical way, loses its direction and purpose. The movie's proceeding direction is too divided by conflicting tones to make the same impact as the opening section. Its new purpose, while thoughtfully satirical about the social consequences of fear, seems too removed from what has come before it. For as much promise as the first act of Judy & Punch shows, the whole of the movie doesn't quite live up to it.

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