Wicked Little Letters: Primly, Properly, Profane

A 1920s English seaside town bears witness to a farcical and occasionally sinister scandal in this riotous mystery comedy. Based on a stranger than fiction true story, WICKED LITTLE LETTERS follows two neighbors: deeply conservative local Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and rowdy Irish migrant Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). When Edith and fellow residents begin to receive wicked letters full of unintentionally hilarious profanities, foul-mouthed Rose is charged with the crime. The anonymous letters prompt a national uproar, and a trial ensues. However, as the town’s women — led by Police Officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) — begin to investigate the crime themselves, they suspect that something is amiss, and Rose may not be the culprit after all.

REVIEW:

In its small odd way Wicked Little Letters makes the case for profanity as art. Not dressed up profanity you might find in Shakespeare, but the full pig- every fuck, shit, cunt and such swelling in its juicy offensiveness. “Fuck off, you pasty old shriveled, old piss bastard, fucking old cunt,” being the crowning glory Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) the Belle of Littlehampton utters to dear old daddy dearest before the horse drawn paddy wagon doors close and she is taken off to prison and twelve months of hard labor for offending genteel sensitivities. Before that she was a prim and proper Christian hypocrite enjoying the secrecy of anonymous dirty letter sent to her neighbors.

The movie is based on actual events that occurred in the English coastal village of Littlehampton in 1920. Edith Swan a spinster living with her father sent nasty profanity filled letters to her raucous and proudly Irish neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). The director Thea Sharrock and writer Jonny Sweet turn the details into a lightly dark comic farce encased in a sweet crime drama that mixes female empowerment with catching the perpetrator red handed. The profane but good and earthy Gooding balances against the good on the outside but jealous, constricted, mischievous Swan. They never quite get a meshing of the two, just a lot of collisions that form the comedy and drama. In the end there is a kind of acknowledgement in the accommodation that the two might be kindred spirits minted on the same coin.

Swan’s pretending to be something that she’s not is the real profanity. It’s viewed as a sin against authenticity. The truly profane, as in honest and true to both her inner and outer self, is Rose. The mystery of who sent the letters is easy to guess. The crime procedural involving Woman Police Officer Moss (Anjana Vasan) is needed to give Wicked Little Letters a semi-sense of justice, to let the audience know that profanity and profane are not really the same thing. The inauthenticity of Swan is spurred by misogyny and prejudice of the men all around her that dismiss her worth.

The movie has the usual amount of goofy side characters and one liners typical for an English production of this type. Colman and Buckley elevate it all to some complexity by filling in the moral heart gaps of their characters. It’s side point about the plight of woman at that time- how they can be elevated and condemned as both Madonna and whore- depending on whether viewed through the prejudice male eye or the more authentic feminine one, exists in the background.

Wicked Little Letters gets a 3.5/5 or a B+. It’s streaming on Netflix.