My main fear about Netflix's upcoming The Thursday Murder Club movie is that it will lose the quintessential British charm that made Richard Osman's book so enjoyable, and after seeing the new trailer, I’m even more worried.
The trailer is slick, beautiful, full of shiny actors — all things that strike me as being a million miles away from the novel. Let’s start with the crazy casting of Pierce Brosnan as Ron, who, along with Joyce (Celia Imrie), Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), solves murders from their retirement village. Brosnan looks magnificently handsome and smooth in the trailer and very much like a man who's played James Bond, because, well, he has.
In the book, he’s painted as a tattooed, grizzled ex-trade union man, so basically the complete opposite of Brosnan. You can imagine Ray Winstone as Ron, but not Brosnan.
But it’s not just Brosnan's casting that gets you worried. The charm of the book is the sense that they're all seeing out their days in peace, but boredom at Coopers Chase until they get involved in murder solving. I got the impression from the book that it's at the upmarket end of retirement homes, but in the movie, it looks like Downton Abbey!
It’s also hard to imagine that the makers, wanting to appeal to a global Netflix audience, will be able to keep in Osman's quirky references to British life for fear that people from other countries won't understand them.
Do Americans get the sort of weird British supermarket class system where Waitrose, which Osman references, is considered at the upmarket end? And how the British secretly judge people based on where they shop?
"Waitrose delivery vans clink with wine and prescriptions,” Osman writes in the book, indicating immediately to British readers that the residents of Coopers Chase are doing well for themselves as they can afford wine from Waitrose. There are also references in the books to things like recording episodes of Inspector Morse, which you can’t imagine staying in.
I’d be far less concerned if the BBC were making it. OK, we wouldn’t get the Hollywood cast, but that wasn’t the point of the book. One of the delights was imagining your grandparents/parents cracking crimes at their retirement village. They're meant to be the type of pensioners people easily ignore because they’re not glamorous.
If you take out all the quirky British humor of the book, I’m not quite sure what you’re left with. This is far from saying it won’t be an entertaining movie; it might be brilliant.
It’s meant to be a faithful adaptation, but I can’t imagine how they will pull that trick off and make it appeal to a global audience. If they do, it will be a masterstroke by American director Chris Columbus. To be fair, he did a great job with the two Harry Potter movies he helmed.
Will The Thursday Murder Club movie get lost in translation? We will have to wait until the end of the month. The Thursday Movie Club movie hits Netflix globally on August 28. In the UK, it will have a limited cinema release on August 22.
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