All Cops Are Bottoms
A review of Michael Grandage’s ‘My Policeman’
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰½
Romance ✰✰
Sex ✰✰✰✰
Storytelling ✰
Performance ✰✰½
Yearning ✰✰✰✰
This review contains *light* spoilers.
Written by Ali Romig
Does anything scream repressed yearning louder than a gray, rocky beach, lined with jagged cliffs and shadowed by an overcast (yet somehow still blindingly white) sky? This imagery might evoke thoughts of Dorset, from 2020’s Ammonite, or maybe Brittany, as seen in 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire—the gold standard of yearning itself. But no, this is Brighton Beach, and the film is Michael Grandage’s My Policeman. The movie is based on the bestselling book by Bethan Roberts which itself was inspired by novelist E.M. Forster’s real-life affair with a police officer.
My Policeman tells the story of one tumultuous love triangle through two distinct timelines, beginning in 1999 as Marion (Gina McKee) prepares her home for the arrival of her estranged friend, Patrick (Rupert Everett), who has suffered a debilitating stroke. She’s offered to be his caretaker, despite her husband Tom’s (Linus Roache) fervent and somewhat childlike objections. When he arrives, Tom refuses to see him, tiptoeing around the house and disappearing on lengthy, brooding walks along the beach. Marion, on the other hand, dedicates herself to Patrick, and the viewer gets the sense that she is trying desperately to make up for something. This feeling intensifies when she finds Patrick’s old diaries, which radiate an air of importance before Marion’s even opened them. Marion and Tom’s house is lifeless, solemn—all low-lighting and colorless decor. An overwhelming silence permeates the place. Patrick’s stroke has left him nonverbal, and Marion and Tom don’t seem to have much to say to each other in general. When Marion begins reading Patrick’s diaries, the betrayal that led to the breakdown of these relationships decades earlier begins to unfold.
Through a mix of memory and narrated journal entries, we are whisked back in time to the summer of 1957, where we’re introduced to a younger Tom (Harry Styles), who’s just finished police training, and Marion, a school teacher (Emma Corrin). The two become close when Tom offers to give Marion swimming lessons, and in return asks the obviously besotted Marion for book recommendations and lessons on art history. He eventually introduces Marion to Patrick (David Dawson), a worldly museum curator who seemingly takes the young couple under his wing and introduces them to opera, Russian literature, and fine wine. In contrast to those set in the 90s, these scenes are vibrantly colored and jovial, full of boisterous fun; the idyllic nostalgia foreshadows obvious fallacy. Of course, three’s a crowd, and it isn’t long before Marion begins to resent Tom’s close, ongoing relationship with Patrick. So it comes as no surprise—despite the filmmakers’ most valiant attempts to misdirect us—when the two men are revealed as lovers, and the dynamic between the three goes from intriguing to tragic (and tragically formulaic).
My Policeman isn’t bad so much as it is wholly predictable. Even the performances come off as prescribed: it felt that instead of the actors being given a chance to discover their characters, they were told exactly what to do and dutifully did their best to hit all the notes they were supposed to, with varying degrees of success. Despite his name being the first thing to appear on screen, this is not Harry Styles’ movie. His performance isn’t laughable by any means—he doesn’t do anything particularly offensive. It’s simply forgettable. He’s a (fairly green) actor trying his best to act, and that’s about it. I get the sense that Harry was told by one too many people that all he’d have to do to be a leading man is play a leading man, but unfortunately for him (and us), it takes a bit more than that. Styles ends up fading into the background, becoming part of the aesthetic of the film rather than a fully formed character. We see many shots of him from behind, against a distinctly British, beachy backdrop, or from the side, looking off—in the distance, somewhere1—but rarely head on (except, notably, in love scenes). And maybe therein lies my biggest problem with My Policeman: the entire premise relies on the titular pig being so charming that the other two can’t help but revolve around him completely; instead, it ends up feeling like they’re circling a drain.
The trio of older actors provide solid performances and are mostly able to make a meal out of the peanuts they’re given. But the real stars of this doomed throuple are Emma Corrin (who broke out with a hauntingly accurate performance of young Princess Di on The Crown) and David Dawson. Corrin does their best to infuse a muted character with rich interiority. However, Marion gets the short end of the stick in the second half of the film, becoming somewhat of a caricature of the jealous, vengeful wife. Dawson is similarly able to bring emotional depth to Patrick, saying much with only his wide eyes and proud body language. It made me wish that Dawson was given more to do—or, at least, the freedom and space to take his character further. There was so much I wanted to know about Patrick—how he reconciled with loving the enemy, what his life was like outside of Tom, the depth of his complicated feelings toward Marion. If the movie had taken the time to interrogate these questions instead of lingering on long shots of Styles looking confused, it may have been more affecting.
Grandage does seamlessly weave the two timelines together, using this plotting device to thoughtfully highlight how our memories often fail or isolate us. In general, I am drawn to nonlinear narratives which more aptly reflect our nonlinear reality. We’re primed to expect our lives will follow some kind of forward-moving path, but more often than not they don’t. We snag on memories or periods of time, returning to these echoes of the past for the answers or inspiration we think might get us back on track. Unfortunately, Grandage’s success in conveying this does not totally make up for a fairly rudimentary script. The dialogue is stilted and a little too on the nose—at one point Patrick proclaims that Anna Karenina is the “most tragic love story, and most true, because all love stories are tragic, aren’t they?” The film is also fairly creeping, coming in at just under two hours, which isn’t a negative in and of itself, but I was left wondering what filled all that space? The unhurried pace of the movie contributes to the hodgepodgey feel of its construction, as the emotions of the characters are, by contrast, quick to escalate. Sometimes this is warranted—mostly in the scenes featuring the older trio, whose feelings we understand have been pent up for years—but some of it decidedly isn’t.
Overall, the storytelling feels contrived. The filmmakers repeatedly and obviously try to manipulate the viewer into believing one thing, just so they can deliver a “shock” when that same thing proves false. Unfortunately, this choice prioritizes hollow twists over genuinely interesting interpersonal dynamics. The first third of the film tries its hardest to convince us that maybe it’s Marion and Patrick who have the romantic history, developing their connection through sidelong glances, shy smiles, and establishing them as intellectual equals—only to later pull the rug out from under us. Gotcha! (It’s the two men who are having the affair—bet you never saw that coming!) But of course we saw it coming. Everyone saw it coming. My grandfather who still calls my girlfriend of six years my “little friend” saw it coming. And the worst part is that after this “surprise” “reveal,” the relationship between Marion and Patrick all but evaporates. What happened to their connection, their friendship? I would’ve much rather done away with the soulless shocks altogether and instead seen the film examine this threesome's complicated dynamic past the predictable. She’s the jilted woman, he’s the misunderstood lover—that’s boring! What about when someone you love and adore loves and adores the only other person you love and adore? That’s Hollywood gold, baby!
There are a few scenes where the filmmakers let go of their shameless engineering with genuinely intriguing results. A particularly explosive dinner scene in which alliances are formed, broken, and reconfigured in a matter of seconds comes to mind. However, these nuanced moments ultimately give way to more disappointing twists.
One place where the movie undeniably excels is in its love scenes between Tom and Patrick. These stolen moments are purposefully slow, allowing the two men to fully, finally, embody themselves and luxuriate in their passion for one another. We even get to linger with them afterwards, feeling—as they do—comfortable in their uninterrupted liberation. In fact, small moments of physical intimacy—both sexual and nonsexual—do much of the heavy lifting in this film. There is a great emphasis on hands: touching and reaching out, running along marble, pointing at a painting, grazing a neck. Marion doesn’t get to experience sexual freedom the way Tom and Patrick do—her love scenes are cautious and mostly unfulfilling. Instead, her release comes from holding her hand out of an open window during a car ride. That’s not to say she doesn’t have moments of poignant physical intimacy though—the most weighty being when she bathes an older Patrick, who can no longer care for himself.
Thinking about this particular scene between Marion and Patrick, I once again feel robbed of a deeper, more meaningful friendship between the two—one that could have set this movie apart from others like it. Because the truth is, much like those cold beaches with their bracing winds, this story is something we’ve seen before—and I’m not convinced it’s an improvement on the form. For a gay love story, the queerness felt incredibly surface-level. At one point, after Marion tells Tom that Patrick is a “sexual pervert,” Tom feebly defends the other man by saying that he’s not, that “people like that wear rouge and walk in a certain way,” and I suddenly found myself wishing I were watching a movie about the “people like that” instead.
Alas, despite the film’s shortcomings, I still found myself tearing up at the end, because I am nothing if not susceptible to orchestral manipulation.
Ultimately, My Policeman doesn’t have much of anything new to say, but maybe that is the point. Another function of the nonlinear timeline is to show us how far we’ve come—or remind us that we haven’t come that far at all. Tom is a policeman who has grown used to separating his truth from the work he does daily, enforcing rules he knows are bullshit with even more stringency in the wake of a great awakening, instead of letting them go. In 1957, being gay in Britain was illegal, even as public opinion on the matter was beginning to sway. This is evidenced by the publishing of the 1957 Wolfden report, which recommended "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.” In 1999, Britain was experiencing another cultural shift, coming out of the regressive Thatcher era and HIV/AIDS crisis. Today in America, we’ve seen a new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced, and just this week watched anxiously as the results rolled in after yet another Most Important Election of Our Lifetime—results that ended up being historic for LGBTQ+ representation in government. So while My Policeman may not be the most innovative film I’ve seen, and certainly isn’t the queerest in it’s sensibility, it does serve as a reminder of how long it takes to creep towards progress, both personally and politically, and just how fragile that hard-won progress can be.
My Policeman is available in a select number of theaters—find a showing near you here. You can also stream the movie on Amazon Prime with a subscription.
Yearners! If you liked this review or anything you’ve read on our Substack since we launched: please consider sharing, commenting, or throwing us a like. It means the world.
Thanks for being here!
Next week on The Yearning, Meg will do her best Josie Gellar impression as she infiltrates Gen Z while reviewing Season 1 of Netflix’s Heartbreak High.
Points allotted for yearning
Reading this review was more enjoyable than watching the film.