They may not be respected as taste-arbiters or as models of good theater etiquette, but the elderly moviegoers of America are the core customer base that keep cinemas running.  While movie studios are flailing in their courtship of a teenage audience that would rather be playing videogames or watching influencer ads at home, the Senior Discount crowd is keeping the industry afloat with only minimal pandering.  Every local film fest, repertory series, and daytime matinee in the nation owes a significant chunk of its cashflow to geriatric retirees, who generally have a much more adventurous approach to art-film programming than younger audiences, who tend to save their trips to the cinema for major Event Films instead of taking a chance on whatever happens to be out from week to week.  It’s a shame, then, that most movies that are cynically marketed to the 65+ age demographic are so … safe, so toothless.  Senior Citizen Comedies like Book Club and 80 for Brady mostly function as feature-length advertisements (for 50 Shades of Gray and the NFL, respectively), relying on the excess charm of their all-star casts without actually giving those actors much to do.  There’s a hint towards sexual naughtiness in their playfully saucy humor, but the movies are afraid to follow through on anything genuinely risqué, in fear of offending or alienating the morals of its target audience.  They take their customers’ attendance & amusement for granted.

Within that context, Wicked Little Letters is essentially a John Waters comedy for the senior set.  A 1920s period piece about women’s changing roles in public life post-WWI, it looks & feels like a routine BBC Films production that packs cinemas for weeks without ever attracting a single attendee under 30.  It doesn’t sound like those movies, though, since its dialogue features long strings of profane, nonsensical insults referring to various characters as “mangy old titless turnips”, “bloody fucking old saggy sacks of chicken piss”, and “fucking old steaming bags of wet leaking shit.”  I know Mrs. Harris was met with an icy response when she went to Paris, but I don’t remember it being that extreme.  Wicked Little Letters is about a pre-Internet shitposting campaign in which a not-so-mysterious letter writer bombards her otherwise wholesome British community with handwritten outbursts of extreme profanity.  Set against the backdrop of women “losing their decorum” after taking on traditionally masculine roles in public life during the war, it’s a comedic overcorrection wherein one especially peculiar woman takes a little too much delight in being able to express herself through cuss for the first time in her pious life.  It played very funny at home, but I imagine its pottymouth punchlines got even bigger laughs in the theater among its target demographic, considering the uproarious response to Mr. Molesley laying out the wrong silverware or whatever in the Downtown Abbey movies.  Its biggest swing is that it does not baby its very much grown-up audience, which is a rarity in this style of comedy.

As a gumshoe mystery and subsequent courtroom drama, Wicked Little Letters is less of a whodunnit than it is a howcatchem.  Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley star as next-door neighbors with unlikely mutual admiration.  Buckley is a loudmouth, hard-drinking Irish lass who says & does exactly what she wants at all times, unburdened by any filters of ladylike public behavior.  Colman is Buckley’s older, more socially restrained frenemy, mostly as a result of the strictly religious, emotionally abusive oppression of her father (Timothy Spall).  Colman is also the sole recipient of the first barrage of pottymouth hate mail, which is immediately blamed on Buckley, given her public disregard for decorum.  Unconvinced that a woman that brazen would hide behind the anonymity of a pen, a local policewoman (Ladyparts guitarist Anjana Vasan) launches an off-the-books investigation of who’s really behind the transgression, which quickly escalates beyond a neighborly spat to instead terrorize an entire community.  It’s immediately obvious who is guilty, and a lot of the early comedic tension is in watching her barely contained amusement with her own naughtiness give herself away.  The fun of the investigation is in watching a small group of women join the effort to expose the truth and vindicate their foul-mouth lush of a friend.  Like with John Waters’s classic suburban invasion comedies, the movie pits the hypocrisy of the upstanding Christian majority against the winning charm of “queers and drunkards” in the court of public opinion and declares a clear, populist victor.  It’s delightful.

Of course, you won’t find any singing buttholes, cannibalized cops, or drag queens eating dog shit in Wicked Little Letters.  All of its naughty profanity is purely verbal, but when contrasted against the typically safe, toothless comedies of manners in this milieu, it’s more than enough to earn its laughs.  I’m sure the real-life gossip column story that inspired the movie is much grimmer & more complicated than how it’s presented onscreen, but I don’t know that there’s any way to depict morally uptight Brits reading the words “You’re a sad stinky bitch” without inviting an audience to laugh.  This audience deserves that laugh, too.  They’ve been drawn to the theater with the promise of naughty, risqué comedies so many times that it’s nice one finally decided to deliver the goods. 

-Brandon Ledet