Daily Mail Reviews Middletown (Mar 2007)

As transcribed by JaneV who brought this to our attention

Film page in the Daily Mail by Chris Tookey.

Middletown (15) Verdict: Period melodrama with one amazingly bad performance (receives 1 star out of 5)

Middletown is another period piece, about a small Irish town in, I think, the 1950s. It's being morally cleansed by a thrusting young clergyman, played by Matthew Macfadyen, another first rate actor who played Darcy in Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice. Writer Daragh Carvile's screenplay starts out as though it might be an intelligent analysis of the difficulty of imposing religious morality on a society that's grown used to easy-going, amoral pragmatism. Why shouldn't the new priest rail against cock-fighting, or drinking on the Sabbath?

Instead of addressing such issues seriously, the film descends rapidly into preposterous, anti-religious melodrama, as the new priest reveals himself to be the man who put the big into bigotry. Macfadyen's performance is hilariously atrocious. But as with Sewell in The Illusionist, he has my sympathy.
With this screenplay, he had no alternative but to go over the top.

The road to cinematic hell is paved not with good intentions, but with the bones of powerful actors trying to give life and sincerity to scripts that don't deserve them.