In an early scene from Netflix’s new film adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club, about a quartet of senior citizen crime solvers, retired spy Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and retired nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie)—the former in a lumpy cardigan with a scarf tied around her hair—approach the village police station. Joyce enthuses about the trick the pair are about to play on the local constabulary. “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,” she tells Elizabeth. “Never use the words bright-eyed, feisty old ladies in my presence again,” Elizabeth replies stonily.
Based on Richard Osman’s bestselling cozy detective novel series and directed by Chris Columbus, The Thursday Murder Club itself can’t abide by Elizabeth’s directive. A longtime deliverer of fat slabs of Hollywood cheese, Columbus is constitutionally incapable of resisting the temptation to wring laughs out of women in their 70s swearing or displaying expertise in anything besides baking and knitting. That scene outside the police station—as well as a scene from the movie in which Joyce shocks a young mother on the bus by explaining what WTF means—never occurs in Osman’s book. Osman may traffic a bit in the patronizing practice of depicting elderly people as cutesy, but he’s smarter and wittier than Columbus, and he has better taste.
The Thursday Murder Club series—the fifth novel, The Impossible Fortune, will be published next month—are the sort of books invariably described as “beloved.” The movie comes spangled with venerable stars of which the audience will already be fond. In addition to Mirren and Imrie, the sleuths include Pierce Brosnan as Ron, a retired labor organizer and constitutional rabble-rouser, and Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim, a former psychiatrist. Jonathan Pryce appears as Elizabeth’s husband, Stephen, who is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. David Tennant has a blast, as he always does when playing the villain, in the role of the sleazebag real estate developer who owns the absurdly posh retirement community where the main characters live. And it’s almost worth sticking around through the whole thing just to catch a deliciously weird cameo by Richard E. Grant.
The premise of The Thursday Murder Club is far from new. Fictional detectives who take advantage of other people’s tendency to underestimate them for superficial reasons are legion. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is the obvious precedent here, the soft-spoken little old lady with a bag of knitting who parlays her sharp observations about human nature—gleaned from the doings in her village of St. Mary Mead—into forensic brilliance. Arguably the original cozy mysteries, Christie’s Miss Marple novels deliver her trademark ingenious puzzles wrapped in the fuzzy angora warmth of rural England.
Osman’s cozies lack Christie’s cleverness, but it hardly matters. Over the years, the subgenre has come to use mystery plots as the scaffolding on which to hang comic character studies and portraits of village life. That’s Osman’s game, and he executes it splendidly, depicting the various personalities in and around the upscale retirement village of Cooper’s Chase with a canny affection. Osman, a former TV producer and game show host, has a delectably tart style, as when he, as Joyce, describes the character played by Tennant as comprising “all the things that can go wrong with men if you leave them to their own devices.”
The mystery in The Thursday Murder Club—which involves the homicides of two unlikable characters—is considerably less engaging. Still, you can’t really skip it, and in the nearly two-hour Netflix film, it takes up valuable time that might otherwise be devoted to letting the stars dig their teeth into Osman’s characters. A TV series would have given the story more room to breathe. Instead, it feels rushed. Furthermore, many of the books’ drollest bits have been dumbed down, presumably for American audiences. A running joke in the novels are the allusions to Elizabeth’s past as some sort of spook. She has spent time in Somalia, knows how to use lip balm to silence the turning of a key in a lock, and has contacts who can supply her with documents an ordinary retiree could never access—a very convenient device in moving the quartet’s investigations along. The fact that Elizabeth never outright acknowledges where she picked up all these skills is the whole point of the joke, but Columbus, ever blunt, has her simply telling Joyce that she used to work for MI6.
Columbus’ touch as a filmmaker is always heavy. Where Osman is tender—particularly in his depiction of Elizabeth’s relationship to Stephen—Columbus is merely sentimental, though he does get off one good joke of his own. “What on earth are you wearing?” Stephen asks his usually elegant wife as she sets out in that cardigan and scarf to play the part of a helpless old lady at the police station. “You look like the queen.” “Do I?” Elizabeth responds quizzically. (Mirren won an Oscar for playing Elizabeth II in The Queen.) Truth be told, however thin the movie’s script, fans of Osman’s books will probably revel in seeing their favorite characters played by such familiar, celebrated actors. Anyone who hasn’t encountered and fallen for Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron on the page, though, will likely just wonder what the fuss is about.
