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Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy is a film love drunk for musical theater, more specifically, the musical theater of Gilbert & Sullivan. Perhaps a bit too in love with them, since it details in the creation of The Mikado from the beginning to the very end, never once glossing over even the tiniest bits of the creative process. This wouldn’t be so bad if we had walked away with a clearer portrait of the numerous characters or locations. It’s a three hour journey from the first flush of an idea to the eventual opening night, but it’s all details and no real narrative.
While it’s interesting as an conceit to jump around between Gilbert & Sullivan banging around the piano coming up with melodies and lyrics then jumping to rehearsals before finally transforming into the opening night version, it doesn’t really give much weight to any place or occurrence. I loved Topsy-Turvy for its grand ambition, but I’m just not sure how successful it was in the long run. Having said that, I would rather watch a film overstuffed with ideas, beautiful costumes, gorgeous art direction and production design, lovely cinematography, and grand scale artistic ambition than one that does even half of those things exceptionally well for a more bland end product.
That’s not to say Topsy-Turvy is a noble failure, far from it, it does too many things too well to be considered a failure in any sense of the word. I just think that it lacks shape and clarity. Films about the artistic process are hard to pull off, especially when it comes to writers. It’s terribly hard to make people hunched over scribbling away at something terribly cinematic. But Leigh is blessed with a very talented ensemble of actors. Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner play William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, respectively. They make quick work of forming a believable bond in the early scenes so that we can imagine that they’ve been working together as artistic partners for a long time before this hiccup. Kevin McKidd, Martin Savage, Dorothy Atkinson, Shirley Henderson, and, especially, Timothy Spall make for a great acting company. Spall in particular has a scene towards the end in which he gets to register disappointment and heartbreaking on the inside while keeping a cool exterior that is pretty magnificent. But I walked away feeling the most for Lesley Manville’s long-suffering wife, the woman who must live with genius and put up with its inconsistencies of mood and affection. She gives a quiet, carefully modulated performance that slowly lets out all of the hurt that’s been boiling over the years.
I wanted to love Topsy-Turvy more than I did, but I still greatly enjoyed it. Maybe it’s because it so joyfully expresses its love for its subject matter in every frame, in every scene. So what if its heedless in structure and lacks strong characters, by and large, there’s a tremendous amount of love and respect in this film. And that counts for a lot.
