The Good Liar

Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen are the names advertised on the trailers, posters and social media promotion. When you see these names you start forming an idea of what type of film you are expecting to see. Light-hearted and more like RED than what you actually get.

This movie is slightly darker than what you would expect. From the opening title sequence you can see that they are both liars and probably cons but who is pulling the bigger con?
If you grew up around the Teddington and heading towards Surrey area then you will have recognised Teddington Station, the pub next to the station and somewhere that looked suspiciously like Eggham throughout this movie. I will state now that Great Western Railway to Paddington does not run from Teddington as Teddington is on the southwestern train line and not the Great Western line. It's been a while since I recognised the surroundings of a film as well as I did for this movie and that comforted me a lot.

The plot goes like this:

Roy (McKellen) and Vincent (Jim Carter- Downton Abbey) are con men. They run schemes that convince well off, unknowing men and women to invest in joint accounts so that Roy can transfer all the money out of the account once the investment has been made and disappear to a new part of England, a new person to con and a new flat. Bettie (Mirren) appears to be a widowed but well off woman who is suffering from ill health and is completely charmed by Roy. Her grandson Steven (Russel Tovi) is the only obstacle to Roy's plan as he is ever present and very suspicious of this old man. Bettie lets it slip that she is worth something like 3 million pounds and Roy decides to attempt to get her to invest all of her money. They take trips to Germany, Paris, Venice etc as Bettie's health appears to be deteriorating rapidly. When in Munich, Steven takes Roy and Bettie to a house and manages to get Roy to explain who he really is and why he speaks German (even though he pretends that he doesn't). At first Roy lies and says that he was an English soldier who was injured in this house when he came to arrest someone after the war with a German man named Hanz. After he gives his account, Steven makes him admit that actually, he is Hanz who in fact was not killed in the accident. Roy was killed in the accident and Hanz came to London after that mission, already speaking English and changed his name, thus assuming the identity of Roy. He has been living a lie and a con ever since.

Bettie manages to convince Roy to put in all of his money in to the savings and Roy attempts to pull off the scam as he normally would, only to discover that upon his return to London, he has forgotten his key pad and cannot transfer any money. He returns to Bettie's house to find it completely empty with only Bettie in it and after a long time she explains to him that she was the girl that he Raped when he was 15 and living in Germany. Her sisters had turned him down and so he took advantage of a younger girl whom he was supposed to be teaching English to. After that even he was thrown out of the house and never permitted back. In retaliation Hanz reported them to the Nazis for something and they were forced out of their house and their lives were ruined. Bettie has been planning her revenge for a long time. The house was a show, although she does have a lot of Grandchildren, did teach at Oxford and is widowed. Steven is not her Grandson but rather the partner of one of her grandchildren. She takes almost all of his money, leaving him with just enough to repay one of the men that he conned at the start of the film and she leaves him to face a few of the people that he wronged throughout the movie.

End of plot.

This movie is darker than first imagined. I was glad that it was the first part of a double screening for me and that Knives out followed it because I needed something to make me laugh.
I don't want to take anything away from this film. It is very well written and balances a serious topic with a bit of humour. I feel that the making of this film will really help a lot of victims. Mirren's character states in the movie that she needed to face him and I think that this is true for a lot of victims. In order to be totally free from it, you need to face your oppressor but she does it in a way that means that she gets the better of him and therefore can close the case. I wouldn't suggest that every victim attempt to pull off something like this but being able to close the event is important and isn't something that can be given to every victim.
Mental health and abuse are things that have only been shown on the screen to depict someone as crazy or in an act of violence to depict a villain. The world that we are living in is now a lot more focused on mental health, talking and making music to help people verbalise what they are feeling. A lot of people will relate to this film in some way and I wont say that this film will have helped them but it is a step in the right direction for women to be able to see that they could continue living, have a happy life and marriage, have children and grandchildren etc and make something of their lives.

I think that the choice to focus on an older woman helped as it showed what can be achieved and didn't show the destruction and damage caused by the initial attack. I think that the casting was perfect. This film showed a slightly different side to all of the cast involved. Violence isn't something that we would normally associate with McKellen and this type of serious role isn't a typical Mirren performance either. For Jim Carter, I enjoy every performance that he gives and his character was much more likeable as he showed a sense of concern and conscience. He was a con artist yes but one who had limits and rules. To criticise the acting in this film would be wrong and unfounded. What I would say about this film is that you probably only need to watch it once. It isn't what you were expecting when you sat down to watch it (unless you have read this post before hand) and it sticks in your memory for a long time. There isn't a real need to buy a copy of the film because you probably wont watch it again for another ten years or so. Rent it so that you can avoid letting it take up space in your film cabinet. Save that space for a film that you will watch on repeat.

A good film. Serious and important. Memorable but so memorable that it doesn't need to be rewatched in a hurry.