TIFF 2015 Review | Murder Musical ‘London Road’ Is Too Bumpy

The ancient idea that society would be better off when some people are eliminated from it persists to our day. (Capital punishment is the most obvious manifestation of that idea in practice in our culture.) The deaths of five prostitutes in the small city of Ipswich, England, brought together neighbors and inspired them to beautify their formerly crumbling working-class environs. It’d all be rather heartwarming and sweet if the residents of London Road weren’t so, well, grateful to a serial killer for ridding their street of those “slags.” 

London Road took several detours on the way to the bigscreen: Director Rufus Norris, the Artistic Director of London’s National Theatre, has adapted a stage musical that lifts its lyrics verbatim from interviews conducted over three years about the murders of those five women. (“This is what they said exactly as they said it,” a title card explains.) The interviewees weren’t the victims’ friends or families, but the people who lived on the street where the sex workers waited for johns — and where the killer lived for ten brief weeks until his arrest.

Before a screening at TIFF, Norris mentioned that the 2001 musical has not been a popular choice for theaters to mount. (Norris also directed the musical’s critically lauded debut production at the National Theatre.) Its unpopularity is hardly surprising: Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s songs are largely spoken-sung with little attention to melodiousness, while the lyrics, perhaps by necessity, feel more functional than aesthetic. The media criticism is wan, and the social commentary scolding. Worst of all, the film’s many disappointments include the reproduction of the very thing it criticizes so heavy-handedly.

London Road boasts no characters in the traditional sense; the townspeople collectively make up the protagonist. The film’s biggest star, a scraggly-bearded Tom Hardy, appears in a cameo manning a taxi. (He evidently likes to drive.) The first act is devoted to the Ipswiches’ various reactions to the news that a killer’s on the loose: shock, paranoia, sadness, gossip. The plot follows the trial of the strangler — smartly never seen on screen — and his former neighbors’ dismay that the only thing that their town and their street will now be known for is murder. “Were those prostitutes killed in that house?” they wonder. One of them tsks with a whaddya-gonna-do shrug that they shouldn’t have been streetwalkers or gotten into strangers’ cars. That three of the dead were only teenagers hardly matters to the people who had the luxury of staying in their houses at night. 

The narcissism is monstrous, and also wholly understandable. Unfortunately, this important paradox is only occasionally recognized as such. Likewise, Norris frequently loses his handle on the slippery shifts in tone, which require admiring the London Road residents for eventually banding together to revamp their neighborhood while condemning them for their narrow definition of who belongs in their community. The most egregious example of that tonal overextension is an ostensibly funny scene in which an old lady drops her sweater, spills her groceries, then loses her shoe while tangled in a crisscross of police tape. Unhelpfully, the stage-bound choreography and frozen smiles during many of the numbers render many of the performances unintentionally arch. 

Olivia Coleman’s Julie eventually emerges as one of the leaders of the neighborhood rejuvenation. Julie’s guilty glee in finding the “silver lining” around the slaughter of five innocents is simply the most self-aware in the community, which continue to hold its nose around, rather than welcome, its vulnerable scapegoats. 

But London Road‘s censure of middle-class insularity is difficult to take seriously when the film likewise refuses to look beyond it, thus committing the same sin it’s accusing the characters of engaging in. To express themselves, the surviving prostitutes get a grand total of one song, in which they look challengingly at the camera but are lumped into some cardboard caricature of sex work, receiving an even lesser sense of personhood than the gradually hateful London Road residents. Nor is there any discussion of why the families of the prostitutes are worth feeling sorry for, but the murdered women are not — another horrific but thematically rich sentiment expressed by the residents.

Instead of just pointing fingers, London Road would have benefitted from a stronger effort to locate the humanity in those who are denied it most. 

Images via BBC Films

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