I met the news that Richard Osman’s 2020 mystery novel “The Thursday Murder Club” would be adapted for the screen with a spark of glee, as happens when something you love is noticed by the wider world. That the wider world had already taken notice — more than 10 million copies of the book have been sold — doesn’t make it seem any less my property. Wondering whether it would be any good could wait.
And here we are. Arriving Thursday on Netflix, the film version — not the miniseries some hoped for — offers a more or less straight plow through the book, though streamlined, simplified and softened. It has the advantage of a cast so appropriate it almost feels that Osman wrote the characters to accommodate them, and the disadvantage of having to discharge its complicated narrative and various human business in two hours. (Exactly two hours, as if that had been a goal.)
The setting is Coopers Chase, an improbably grand retirement community in the south of England. (I hadn’t pictured it being so fancy, and I don’t remember there being llamas.) Here we meet four very different residents united around an unusual hobby, meeting weekly — that is, on Thursdays, when they have the room reserved — to discuss unsolved murders with an eye to solving them. (They lack only a podcast.)
Elizabeth Best (Helen Mirren) is the leader, no-nonsense, clever, with a past in “international relations,” by which is not meant diplomacy; Ron Ritchie (Pierce Brosnan), a union organizer known in his prime as “Red Ron”; Ibrahim Arif (Ben Kingsley), a former psychiatrist; with newcomer Joyce Meadowcroft (Celia Imrie), an ex-nurse and an inveterate baker, and bringer, of cakes. (Joyce, replacing Elizabeth’s good friend Penny, in a coma in the hospice wing, is granted “temporary” membership in their club.) One mystery, which the film never addresses — it’s less of one on the page, where the mind’s eye adjusts the setting to a believable degree of plushness — is how some of them can afford to live there at all. I mean, I’ve seen some nice retirement homes, but this is a level above next level.
The plot kicks in when the village’s existence is threatened by greedy co-owner Ian Ventham (David Tennant), who wants to develop the land, turning a historic church and its cemetery into luxury flats and the rest of the grounds into an event space. This sets him against business partner Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), a man of shady reputation but appealing in the way old British comedy criminals can be, whose aunt is a resident. (The two are seen arguing — someone is always seen arguing with someone just before one of them dies in a murder mystery.) When Curran is indeed killed, the opportunity to investigate an “actual murder” so excites Joyce that she runs to wake her new friends for an “emergency meeting” — “Isn’t it wonderful?” she exults.
The Club also acquires an auxiliary member in the form of police officer Donna De Freitas (Naomi Ackie), recruited to get them inside information, but also because they can see that Donna is not satisfied giving safety talks to pensioners — that’s how they met — and bringing coffee to detectives, and they are fundamentally kind people. Dragged along in her wake is her superior, inspector Chris Hudson (Daniel Mays), comically exasperated in the classic manner. Also in the mix are Bogdan Jankowski (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a Polish immigrant working for Ventham, and Ron’s son Jason (Tom Ellis), a champion boxer whose career was sidelined by injury and now makes his living on celebrity reality TV. (Before turning author, Osman worked before and behind the camera in British panel and competition shows, and does still.) Richard E. Grant makes a very creepy cameo, bringing an element of danger otherwise absent from the film. Jonathan Pryce plays Elizabeth’s husband, Stephen, no longer in the early stages of dementia, and his scenes with Elizabeth and Bogdnan, who becomes a chess partner, are handled beautifully, with an absence of corn.
With a plot that involves multiple main characters, the adaptation inevitably becomes suggestive, skeletal, fleshed out by actors who can tell you who they are even when the script doesn’t. (There are more murders in the book than on the screen.) Only Brosnan, with his undimmed movie star features and bearing, seems an odd choice for his part — “I thought: ‘This is Ray Winstone, bro,’” he has said of his casting as the rough-edged, pugnacious Ron. But there’s no arguing his charisma. One just likes to look at him. He was James Bond.
Joyce, whose diaries form a large part of the book, becomes the reader’s eyes into a story that is also about her journey into friendship and renewal; the film loses that quality. (They might have made her a narrator.) Her delight in small things is signaled here by Imrie’s chirpy performance, bits of homey eccentricity and passing comments — bringing a coffee machine to an outdoor protest (because “good coffee means we can protest longer”), or telling Elizabeth “I like your jumper” as they arrive at the police station in disguise.
“This is ever so exciting,” Joyce says. “I feel like we’re in one of those Sunday night dramas about two bright-eyed, feisty old lady detectives outsmarting the police at every turn.” “Never use the words ‘bright-eyed, feisty old ladies’ in my presence again,” says Elizabeth.
Written by comedian Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote (Season 3 showrunner on “Killing Eve”), the film has been directed by Chris Columbus, a workmanlike director whose money-minting successes include “Home Alone,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” and the first two “Harry Potter” films. It’s hard to say what he adds to the material, other than staying out of its way. You couldn’t call his “Thursday Murder Club” nuanced, and it’s almost completely without suspense, but in the simplest terms, it fulfills the assignment. Some of the filmmakers’ “solutions” are illogical or make a motivation less interesting, but you’re here for the company as much as the mystery — this is true of the novels as well, of which there are five, with the imminent release of “The Impossible Fortune” — and it’s pleasant enough to watch the cast parade in their quirky personas for a couple of hours.
But read the books.
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