Typ­ist Artist Pirate King review – clev­er­ly picks apart biopic clichés

Let’s be frank: nine times out of 10, bio­graph­i­cal films about artists are total, hagio­graph­ic pap. When you’re mak­ing a film about the life of a famous per­son, there’s so much bag­gage relat­ing to lega­cy, image, his­tor­i­cal record, and how to amply elic­it the mean­ing of vital events in their lives in a way that’s both diplo­mat­ic and creative.

To even up the odds, though, you can always spend a bit of time search­ing for a sub­ject who feels tru­ly wor­thy of cin­e­mat­ic cel­e­bra­tion, which is exact­ly what Car­ol Mor­ley has done with her won­der­ful new film, Typ­ist Artist Pirate King. The strange title refers to the occu­pa­tion print­ed on the pass­port of one Audrey Amiss. It’s a doc­u­ment that was dis­cov­ered dur­ing efforts to inven­to­ry the vast and bizarre artis­tic hold­ings she left upon her death in 2013.

As essayed in a tremen­dous­ly com­mit­ted and com­plex per­for­mance by one of Britain’s great­est actors, Mon­i­ca Dolan, we meet Amiss in her pokey Clapham bed­sit which is burst­ing at the seams with scrap­books stuffed with lov­ing­ly mount­ed junk food pack­ag­ing and whim­si­cal anno­ta­tions. She wails, curs­es and mono­logues about a life pock­marked with break­downs and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties, yet a cer­tain plucky spir­it pre­vails, and the film kicks off prop­er when she coerces her exas­per­at­ed care work­er San­dra (Kel­ly Mac­don­ald) to take a road trip back to her birth­place of Sun­der­land for an exhi­bi­tion of her work.

The chem­istry between Dolan and Mac­don­ald is pure With­nail and I, with Amiss pre­sent­ed as a trag­ic chat­ter­box whose sple­net­ic rants are pep­pered with moments of droll poet­ry. San­dra, mean­while, is on the con­stant verge of slam­ming on the breaks and leav­ing Audrey on the hard shoul­der of a motor­way. Indeed, Mor­ley reveals a hereto­fore unseen knack for com­e­dy, not just in the sur­re­al­ly wit­ty dia­logue, but in the dead­pan stag­ing and fram­ing which ref­er­ences (but nev­er speaks down to) the kitsch arte­facts present in Amiss’ own work. This road trip frame­work is used as a way for Audrey to work through var­i­ous life issues, as she (more than San­dra) knows that this epic voy­age needs to end with a mass purg­ing of per­son­al demons via a vis­it to her lev­el-head­ed sis­ter, Dorothy (Gina McKee).

This is a film that ends up com­pris­ing much more than the sum of its picaresque parts, as Mor­ley fil­ters in a damn­ing, yet sub­tle com­men­tary on England’s woe­ful men­tal health pro­vi­sions, arts fund­ing cuts in the north, the Catholic church’s inabil­i­ty to amply con­sole its flock, and the weird beau­ty that we poten­tial­ly miss from dis­miss­ing eccen­tric peo­ple at face value.

The larky tone is punc­tu­at­ed with spar­tan mon­tages of Amiss’ work, pre­sent­ed in a way that is both dry­ly iron­ic and true to the artist’s mis­chie­vous spir­it. Not every­thing in the film works, and there’s the odd rough edge here and there. But these are eas­i­ly for­giv­en in light of the fact that it’s so clear that Mor­ley is push­ing to make a shrine that her sub­ject may have appre­ci­at­ed as well as a state­ment about an Eng­land in decline that is bold, angry but nev­er once cynical.

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

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