Writer/director Ryan J Smith’s Arthur’s Empire is what would happen if Mackenzie Crook had written Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. Shot on a microbudget and a limited schedule, this is an excellent British crime-comedy that thankfully doesn’t veer into the dark Conradian jungle of Richard Curtisesque mawkishness.
The plot follows Sam (Jake Waring), a journalist frustrated with his job at a Time Out style magazine, who wants to become a novelist. When his boss Lawrence (Peter Adams), commissions him to write a local colour piece about any coastal town of his choosing, Sam decides on Blackpool because it’s cheap ( to non-British readers Blackpool is a formerly thriving seaside resort town, that is now sadly an unemployment blackspot suffering from decades worth of government underinvestment).
Once he arrives, Sam happens upon a Grade II listed antiques shop ran by Arthur an eccentric Falklands veteran (Grahame Edwards) that is due to be turned into a block of luxury flats that no one in the town can afford to live in. Sam quickly realises that Arthur and the shop’s receptionist Kelsey (Elizabeth Hope) would make for a great piece.
As a writer Ryan J Smith’s dialogue is both witty and naturalistic, although nowhere near as hardboiled, he has a Richard Price like quality of understanding the ebb and flow of a conversation as well as specific slang and dialect. His characters, even one as seemingly larger than life as Arthur ( having visited an antique shop called Looses Emporium, there are tonnes of people like Arthur either managing or working there),come across as being fully formed people that you would actually encounter in real life.
Although shot on a small budget, yet through good lighting and interesting location sets the movie still has a distinct look. In particular, Smith’s framing of Blackpool captures the desolate loneliness of its present state, giving us the noirish image of a seaside town’s lost grandeur reminiscent of a Jules Dassin or Otto Preminger movie.
The performances are solid across the board, but its Grahame Edwards as Arthur who really stands out. Edwards plays both Arthur’s barking madness and his fatalistic sense of losing his business perfectly – the odd couple dynamic that the character forms with Sam works because of Edwards and Waring’s screen chemistry together, as Waring takes on the straight man role in their scenes.
Overall, Arthur’s Empire is a testament to the power of good writing and screen chemistry being all you need to tell a compelling story. If you enjoy domestic slice of life comedies juxtaposed with crime a la Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz or Alan Partridge Alpha Papa this is the movie for you.
