None of us were privy to the casting process for Alice Troughton’s “The Lesson,” but I sincerely hope, with my entire heart, that they opened a bottle of champagne after locking in Richard E. Grant. He plays J.M. Sinclair, a fabulously successful and comfortably wealthy British author, the kind of fellow who lives on a rambling estate and works out of a plush office surrounded by the great works of literature. Grant is, unsurprisingly, smashingly convincing in the role, which capitalizes on his peerless ability to convey blithe contempt and casual, sneering intellectual superiority. He’s lived like this for so long; he can’t imagine anything putting that life in peril. And yet.
READ MORE: Tribeca 2023 Festival: 20 Films To Watch
Sinclair isn’t really the main character of “The Lesson”; that would be Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack), a would-be author whom the Sinclairs hire as a tutor, to help their smarmy little shit of a son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), prep for his Oxford entrance exams. “He has to get in, Liam,” insists Hélène Sinclair (Julie Delpy), an art curator (again, perfect casting). The tutor is a live-in position, which makes Liam, for a time at least, part of the family, and he immediately keys in on the simmering resentments and open wounds within this wildly dysfunctional brood, where everyone is too smart and too petty for their own good. They mostly keep to themselves, so those schisms are primarily present in their painfully uncomfortable nightly dinners (Delpy is a real master of seething and chewing simultaneously). They had another son, Felix, who killed himself a few years earlier; now, Liam finds himself sitting at Felix’s table setting and even, when caught in a surprise rainstorm, wearing Felix’s clothes.
Nevertheless, he can’t believe his good fortune; he’s not just a writer but a Sinclair acolyte, and his current employer was the subject of his thesis. “I’m sure he’d be flattered, but you’re not here for him,” Hélène tells Liam, but we can’t help but wonder about that—and about Liam in general. He’s an enigma, a smiling, agreeable, ever-present cipher, slowly and slyly ingratiating himself, increasingly seeing and hearing things he shouldn’t. He eventually impresses Mr. Sinclair, at least marginally, and Liam’s hero asks him to help out, loosely, in the new novel’s “home stretch.” What could go wrong?
Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is tightly structured, telling this story in a prologue, three parts, and epilogue, and when Liam hedges his praise for the new book by noting, “The ending, Part III? It feels like a different novel,” well, they’re laying on the meta-commentary pretty thick. That tiniest bit of critique turns Sinclair against his potential protégé, of course; his feedback for Liam’s debut novel is surgically precise in its cruelty. (He deems it not even a novel, and at least that much is accurate—it’s definitely not a novel, if for no other reason than that it’s contained in a single, slender volume, written entirely in longhand.) “I’m saving your life, Liam,” Sinclair tells him at this diatribe’s conclusion and throws him a toothy grin, a perfect gesture of absolute insincerity, Grant’s best-acting beat in the picture.
For much of its running time, “The Lesson” makes great hay of its central tonal tension; it’s all very straight-forward and formal, but the Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score is a broad wink, playful yet grandiose, full of winking little trills and ornate glides. It’s positioned ever so slightly ahead of the movie, but as the characters descend into big, drama-queen gestures like tearing out pages and tossing them into the lake, the clearer the picture’s nods towards camp and trash become.
Thankfully, the filmmaker and actors are smart enough to know you can only play that kind of thing with a straight face. Delpy plays it with the straightest, forming a bond with Liam over their mistreatment and carefully sizing up her moves hence. There’s a single moment, late in the film, where she fixes Liam with a gaze that is utterly transfixing—one of those great moments of screen acting where the performer is telling us everything and nothing all at once. McCormack does not, by the nature of the character, get the kind of show-off moments his co-stars do, but he’s a firm, steady anchor, and his casting is fairly ingenious; the character’s Blackness is never explicitly mentioned, but it’s also weighing on every scene and every interaction, in how these people see and treat him.
Alas, just as predicted by its own script, it falls apart a bit in Part III. There are little false notes along the way, spots where it all feels a bit too schematic, and the dialogue too arch and pointed for casual conversation (even among such brainy types as these). But Grant hits a couple of false notes at a critical point late in the story, and Troughton doesn’t quite deliver the payoff she’s been building towards—or, more accurately, she gets there too tastefully. By that point, we’re ready to see these wretched beasts laid bare, and a bit more of the theatrical sensibility that makes the early passages so delightfully unpredictable would’ve been welcome in the home stretch. Nevertheless, until then, “The Lesson” plays and gives one of our most entertaining actors an especially meaty role to devour. [B]
Follow along for all our 2023 Tribeca Film & Television Festival coverage.