Director Roger Michell’s approach to the predictable yet plucky heist flick The Duke resembles that of a cat burglar who’s figured out that the secret to career longevity is getting in and getting out quietly and with a minimum of fuss. Based on a real-life case, the film dramatizes the unlikely story of Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), an occasionally employed 57-year-old from northern England who was charged in 1961 with stealing Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. The twist in the tale is that Kempton appeared to have committed the theft not to fence a rare work of art, but to make a somewhat obscure political point about the government spending £140,000 on a painting of an aristocrat while forcing pensioners to pay to watch the BBC.
The Duke starts with Kempton on trail at the Old Bailey and then spools back six months to lay out the fumbling crime and lackadaisical cover-up that led him to court. The planning of the theft itself, involving a ladder and an unlatched bathroom window, is almost incidental to the story and played more for comedy than thrills (in a too-good-to-be-true moment, a shot of the Goya painting being nipped reveals that the inestimably more valuable The Scream was hanging right near it). The screenplay, by Young Marx playwrights Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, is more attentive to the particulars of Kempton’s against-the-grain populism.
As written, Kempton is a classic crank whose vision of the world as it should be sits in diametric opposition to what he sees. He gets fired from one job after another for running his mouth—ranting about inequities to customers in his cab, barking at the manager at a bakery for being a racist. In between gigs, he sets up petition tables on street corners to lobby for making the TV license free for veterans and the elderly (he fights the power at home by fixing his television so that it can’t show the BBC and refusing to pay the license on principle). A blue-collar autodidact who prefers Chekhov to Shakespeare, he also regularly writes and submits TV plays to the BBC, at least one of which appears to be an autobiographical attempt to deal with his guilt over an accident that claimed the life of his daughter years before.
Throughout, the filmmakers use a peppy lounge jazz-inflected soundtrack and split-screen edits to deliver a light-hearted caper sensibility. This approach and the breathless tabloid coverage of the theft (in which the police opine that the thief may have had commando training) contrasts comedically with the humdrum realities of Kempton’s home life. Living in a nondescript brick rowhouse in a rough-and-tumble industrial town, the family seems kept together mostly through the efforts of Kempton’s long-suffering wife, Dorothy (Helen Mirren).
A cleaning woman dedicated to maintaining appearances, Dorothy is the ballast that keeps the bubbly Kempton and their wayward sons (Fionn Whitehead and Jack Bandeira) housed and fed. The tensions between her know-your-place practicality and his idealism produces some low-key domestic drama that never suggests that it will not be tidily tied up before the credits roll on The Duke. As for the question of just how far a film can coast on Broadbent’s twinkle and Mirren’s vinegary snap, the answer is further than you would think but not quite far enough.
The fleetness and economy of Michell’s direction, as well as his ability to play to his stars’ strengths, ensures that The Duke sustains its momentum. At the same time, the film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate Kempton. And the story’s gooey sentimentality becomes more apparent in the concluding trial scenes, where Kempton’s barrister, played by a ridiculously likeable Matthew Goode, mops the floor with the prosecution and the entire courtroom chuckles delightedly at every one of Kempton’s utterances. This stretch of The Duke takes on a far more predictable cast than the light-hearted and low-key material that preceded it.
Though possessed of a far posher pedigree than that of its protagonist, The Duke is in some ways an underdog itself. The film breaks no new ground and will likely be quickly forgotten until it pops up in the “recommended” section of somebody’s streaming service after they’ve watched, say, Michell’s Tea with the Dames. But its tale of the rabble-rousing populist art thief nevertheless steers an unlikely and generally entertaining path between the hyped-up energy favored by many heist stories and the thumping editorializing of a Ken Loach drama.
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