accessAtlanta

Wah-Wah': By any name, a well-acted tale

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Wah-Wah," the odd-sounding title of actor-turned-director Richard E. Grant's feature debut, has nothing to do with Helen Keller or "The Miracle Worker."

It's a term coined by brash American former stewardess Ruby Compton (Emily Watson) for the sort of silly prattle — "the snooty baby talk" — spoken by a bunch of snobby Brits living the colonial life in Swaziland in the late 1960s. "Toodle-doo. Pip, pip, pip," she snorts. "It's all a lot of wah-wah to me."

Samuel Goldwyn Films

'Wah-Wah'

The verdict: A well-acted coming-of-age tale that knocks the stuffing out of some British stiff-upper-lips in late '60s Swaziland.

Director: Richard E. Grant
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson, Nicholas Hoult, Emily Watson, Julie Walters
Run time: 99 minutes
Release date: May 12, 2006
Rating: R for some language and brief sexuality.
See showtimes

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

The sun is finally setting on this particular piece of the ever-shrinking British Empire. But much like the insular community of ex-pat English snots in "White Mischief," these relics are much less interested in what will happen when the locals are finally treated as equals than they are in social pecking orders. "She spoke to Lady Hardwick first," whispers an aghast guest at one of their endless soirees. "It just isn't done."

Grant is also more interested in the personal than the political. "Wah-Wah" is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story in which his protagonist's adolescence coincides with the Empire's last gasp. For young Ralph Compton (Zachary Fox), the racial implications of an important cultural shift aren't nearly as important as the seismic shifts in his parent's floundering marriage. His father, Harry (Gabriel Byrne), is an important somebody in the Ministry of Education, with a chest-full of medals and a cheating wife, Lauren (Miranda Richardson). She thinks if anyone deserves a medal, "It's me, for sticking it out in the boring middle of nowhere."

In short order, she takes off with her lover, Ralph is shipped off to boarding school (at his request) and Harry sinks into a booze-drenched depression.

When Ralph (now played by "About a Boy's" Nicholas Hoult) returns a few years later, Harry's not only stopped drinking, he's remarried — to Ruby.

The acting is across-the-board excellent, from Byrne's raging, self-pitying Harry to Julie Walters' abandoned wife caught in the riptide of Lauren's affair. The first and second Mrs. Comptons are even better: Richardson is as seductive as she is selfish, while Watson shows us Ruby's free-spiritedness can be as crass as it is admirable.

What the movie lacks in depth — it's really little more than a glimpse of this boy and these people in this place at this time — it makes up for in its well-observed details and sneaky humor. Grant reminds us that even a heartless mother is still a mother to her son; Ralph treasures Lauren's lipstick-stained cocktail glass long after she leaves.

We witness the way the desperate, unattached women swarm all over Harry once he's available. And the flinty reception accorded Lauren when she attempts to re-enter their tight little circle as a divorced woman. "I'm not invisible," she huffs, which elicits the response, "No, you're divorced. Which is far worse."

Grant is at his ironic best when his characters prepare an amateur production of "Camelot" for a rumored visit by Princess Margaret. The very notion is so misguided, it's hilarious. As "Wah-Wah" makes ever so clear, the tiny existence of these self-absorbed twits is but a fumbled footnote in British history — anything but one brief shining moment.