Hampstead (12A)

THE filmmakers behind Hampstead may have dreamed of a Notting Hill style sensation. Set your tale of a nobody taking on the establishment in another picture-postcard part of London, give the film its name, throw an American icon into the mix, Bob’s your uncle. Or not.

Hampstead is based on a true story with bags of potential. The late Harry Hallowes was a man who lived in a self-made shack on Hampstead Heath, was threatened with eviction by a property developer and challenged them by claiming squatters’ rights. It’s possible to imagine it as a modern-day Ealing comedy, or a satire that taps into the increasingly heated poverty gap debate in today’s Britain. Instead, it aspires to little more than gentle romantic drama, and even as that it’s painfully mediocre.

The heath is something of an idyll, a gorgeous wilderness in the middle of the metropolis. Not surprisingly, most of those living in its environs are very, very rich. And the core premise of the adaptation is that the rich do like to protect their patch.

Emily (Diane Keaton) is an American widow living in a lovely mansion block apartment overlooking the heath. She’s a pleasant, good-hearted, rather sad woman, who works in a charity shop while burying her head in the sand over the debts left by her husband.

She does not see eye-to-eye with her ladies-who-lunch neighbours, who constantly campaign against one perceived eyesore after another. So when their leader Fiona (Leslie Manville) urges Emily to sign a petition against a supposed tramp who lives in the shack close to their homes, she commendably steps back.

And then she happens to meet the chap. And Donald (Brendan Gleeson) isn’t what she or any other cloistered bourgeois burgher might expect. He’s a loner, for sure, but passionate, articulate, self-sufficient, simply someone who has chosen to live alone in semi-nature, minding his own business; certainly no tramp, but a man who’s lived in the same home for 17 years.

As the heat against him is turned up (and we learn that Fiona has a vested interest) the bear-like Irishman and the timid Yank fall in love. And in campaigning for his rights Emily finally taps into the sense of purpose that has been eluding her, her whole life.

This is a sterling example of a good story ruined in the telling. From the stock characters (the Asian doorman, an oleaginous suitor, the dutiful, blandly gorgeous son) to Emily talking aloud to her husband’s gravestone so the scriptwriter can relate her back story, to the twee tinkling soundtrack that fills in every space between words, this affair reeks of rote.

Emily’s strolls around Hampstead village unavoidably evoke Hugh Grant’s passage along Portobello Road in Notting Hill, and Donald’s discomfort with celebrity that of Grant’s mild-mannered bookseller who just happens to fall in love with a movie star. The difference between the two films is that Notting Hill nailed its romcom formula, thanks both to smart comic writing and fine performances, and this falls woefully short.

Diane Keaton has had her moments, notably with Woody Allen and in The Godfather films, but she can be an affected, irritating actress, and here fails to make Emily particularly sympathetic. It doesn’t help to see the cogs of her acting style so conspicuously in motion. If the film has one saving grace it’s the great Gleeson, who makes an endearing, intriguing fist of a man who may have made mistakes and be far too inflexible, yet has more integrity in his little finger than everyone around him combined.

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