Mad About the Boy: The Noël Cow­ard Story

Releas­ing a doc­u­men­tary pro­file on a tow­er­ing cul­tur­al fig­ure to mark 50 years since their death feels per­func­to­ry, and more often than not, yields pre­dictable results. That’s not to say that there haven’t been many a film­mak­er whose styl­is­tic inno­va­tions have proven this the­sis wrong. Alas, Mad About the Boy: The Noël Cow­ard Sto­ry offers no such rebuttal.

This doc­u­men­tary gets the job done in terms of giv­ing a pot­ted his­to­ry on one of the most mul­ti­fac­eted artists of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, chart­ing career high­lights across his wide body of work that spans stage, page, screen, and cabaret, but doesn’t do much else in terms of delv­ing into its fas­ci­nat­ing subject’s process­es. Direc­tor Barn­a­by Thomp­son deploys the usu­al set-up, minus the talk­ing heads: an assort­ment of grainy archive footage and still pho­tographs that explore both the breadth of Coward’s prodi­gious career and delve into his pri­vate life, par­tic­u­lar­ly his homosexuality.

The nar­ra­tive relies on Alan Cum­ming and Rupert Everett: Cumming’s nar­ra­tion repeat­ed­ly insist­ing that Coward’s rags-to-rich­es tra­jec­to­ry and suc­cess­es across the pond led him to rede­fine the image of the ​“quin­tes­sen­tial Eng­lish­man,” Everett is the voice of Cow­ard, and he recites rem­i­nisces, con­tem­pla­tions and anec­dotes from his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. The film crams in as much as pos­si­ble and ends up entire­ly bereft of dra­mat­ic heft, and it is about as reward­ing as scrolling through Coward’s Wikipedia page.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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