Reviews

February 1, 2025

Sundance Film Festival Reviews 2025: “The Ballad of Wallis Island” & “Jimpa”

 

THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND (Focus/Universal – March 28):  A low-key British charmer.  A decade ago, Herb (Tom Basden) had a successful run as part of a folk duo with Nell (Carey Mulligan), which ended when they broke up both personally and professionally.  Now, Herb is still trying to establish himself as a solo artist when he’s offered a small fortune to give a concert on remote Wallis Island.  Herb imagines a glamorous gig for tycoons, but of course he doesn’t know the whole story.  His host, Charles (Tim Key) is an eccentric who won the national lottery not once but twice, the concert is a private performance only for him, and the island consists of little more than Charles’s house and a few local storefronts.  Also, unbeknownst to Herb, Charles has invited Nell too, because he doesn’t care about Herb as a solo act, his obsession is with the original pair.  The Ballad of Wallis Island was expanded by director James Griffiths and writers Basden and Key from a short they all did more than a decade ago (Basden and Key have also written all the original songs, and Basden and Mulligan sing them), and it glows with the nurturing the group has given it.  The script is filled with the kind of wordplay and gentle life lessons we associate with the pre-Monty Python era of UK comedy, and it’s unfailingly kind to its characters.  (Consumer note:  as her “and” billing suggests, Mulligan has more of a supporting role than a lead, although she does all one could ask with it.)  Key is lovably batty, and Basden can make a slow burn simmer for minutes at a time.  Griffiths, who’s gone on since the short to an extremely successful career as a TV director, guides the material beautifully, not letting it dawdle while preserving the underlying emotions of its characters.  Ballad of Wallis Island is getting a theatrical release, and whether its small-scale, modest pleasures can attract a significant audience will say something about the state of the indie marketplace.

JIMPA (no distrib):  A film that strains the “semi” in semiautobiography.  In real life, Sophie Hyde is an Australian filmmaker whose father came out of the closet when she was a child.  For a while, he and her mother co-parented Sophie and her sister, but then he moved to Amsterdam, where he forged a new life as an LGBT and community activist and professor.  He and Sophie were never estranged, but they lived mostly separate lives, until late in his life after he’d had a stroke, she, her partner and their nonbinary teen Aud Mason-Hyde came to visit.  During the trip, Aud and their grandfather bonded, Sophie tried to work out her complicated issues with her father, and ultimately it became clear that this would be their last time together.  Jimpa tells more or less this exact story, even to the point that while Hyde has cast Olivia Colman (here named Hannah) and John Lithgow (Jim) as father and daughter, Aud plays a version of themself, named Frances.  It’s hard to know how to evaluate this as a narrative.  It goes far beyond the meta-comedy of something ilke Curb Your Enthusiasm, where characters have the performers’ real names but are taking part in clearly fictional storylines.  In Jimpa, when Hyde makes a point of showing that Hannah is so desperate to avoid conflict that she overlooks her father’s conspicuous, if winning, narcissism, is that self-criticism or something imposed on the story?  Putting aside the confessional nature of the work, Colman and Lithgow are as always joys to watch, and Jim has a collection of adorable elderly gay friends who have their own opinions about such recent developments as the use of the word “queer” and nonbinary pronouns.  Jimpa has moments that are moving and funny.  Over its 123 minutes, though, a lot of it feels like diary entries created more for the person keeping the journal than for the public at large.



About the Author

Mitch Salem
MITCH SALEM has worked on the business side of the entertainment industry for 20 years, as a senior business affairs executive and attorney for such companies as NBC, ABC, USA, Syfy, Bravo, and BermanBraun Productions, and before that, at the NY law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. During all that, he has more or less constantly been going to the movies and watching TV, and writing about both since the 1980s. His film reviews also currently appear on screened.com and the-burg.com. In addition, he is co-writer of an episode of the television series "Felicity."