Adapted by Suzanne Allain from her own novel, Emma Holly Jones’s Mr. Malcolm’s List begins like any number of recent period comedies that riff on Jane Austen’s social and romantic satires. The film’s imagery consists mostly of gorgeously lit manor interiors and verdant pastoral landscapes, while the characters, especially the women, behave like present-day people in open conflict with the restrictive social mores of the time. Which is to say that Mr. Malcolm’s List is immediately hamstrung by a clash of creative visions.
We meet Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) as a well-moneyed bachelorette from a family whose only concern is to find a “proper match” for her, but she would seem almost intent on defying those wishes. When Julia attends an opera with the dashing Jeremy Malcolm (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù), his unsubtle interrogation on her political and social awareness causes her to embarrass herself. Julia’s reaction feels out of time, as if she had been exposed to a chauvinist on a dating app rather than a familiar haughty member of the 19th-century upper class who’s also a force of unquestioned patriarchy. Julia then takes things to the next level by concocting a plan to find Jeremy’s perfect woman, then have her reject him.
Julia’s humiliation divorces her from all tethers to propriety and she becomes almost feral with rage when she learns that Jeremy keeps a personal checklist of desired qualities in a wife. Her anachronistically demonstrative anger begins Mr. Malcolm’s List on a confused note, but the film takes an interesting turn when its focus shifts to Julia’s less prosperous lifelong friend, Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto), whom Julia recruits to seduce Jeremy according to the items on his checklist. In so doing, Julia reveals her assumed authority over Selina, often speaking of making Selina into Jeremy’s ideal woman as if her friend were an uncivilized Eliza Doolittle, despite the fact that Selina is by far the smartest and most engaging of the two.
This class-consciousness is a welcome twist, and it sets up further disruptions of expectation. Naturally, Selina and Jeremy hit it off, but less as a result of Julia’s coaching than Selina’s inherent intelligence and self-confidence. (Poor Julia thinks that Jeremy’s quizzing on the Corn Laws refers to a dietary restriction, while Selina can speak at length on topical political matters.) While Mr. Malcolm’s List does criticize Jeremy for having something as impersonal and presumptuous as a checklist for judging women, it also treats him as a complex human being worthy of respect in how assiduously he pursues a partner that he can view as a peer and not as glorified property. And all the while, Dìrísù complicates his character’s imperious exterior with moments of infectiously boyish elation as Jeremy falls for Selina.
Other characters are similarly multi-dimensional. Captain Henry Ossory (Theo James), a family friend of Selina’s and a decorated veteran, initially seems like just another pretty face and potential romantic rival, only for the film to home in on his debilitating PTSD and innate chemistry with Julia. Speaking of Julia, she’s the closest thing that Mr. Malcolm’s List has to a villain in her single-minded quest for revenge and disregard for Selina’s romantic feelings. Yet even she’s treated with sympathy, presented as a woman whose blinkered desire for revenge is the result of being so incapable to see beyond the horizons afforded to a woman of her position that even her parents come across as more progressive in their outlook on marriage.
Frustratingly, after doing so much to distance itself from rom-com conventions, Mr. Malcolm’s List settles for the genre’s stalest clichés in its final act. The truth comes to light and the manipulated party is outraged beyond reason, while the now-lovesick trickster begs forgiveness on the way to a tediously predictable conclusion that undoes much of the spirit of the preceding 90 minutes with a simplistic conflict resolution and a happily-ever-after coda. The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.
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