2 stars
Daisy Ridley has one of the more interesting cinematic CVs of the last decade. On the one hand, she’s starred in a wide range of fascinating films, from the reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet called Ophelia to Young Woman and the Sea, a biopic of competitive swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who, in 1926, was the first woman to ever swim across the English Channel. On the other hand, she’s Rey from Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, a pivotal and, according to internet trolls, controversial part of the Lucasfilm empire.
One hopes that being in the Star Wars canon pays her enough to keep making exciting film choices because when she’s not wrapped up in some galaxy-spanning conflict, Ridley creates some genuinely compelling characters. Even if the movie she’s in doesn’t serve her well.
In her latest film, Magpie, Ridley plays Anette, a young mom trying to get her professional and personal life back on track after the birth of her second child. She also has to deal with her self-absorbed husband, Ben (Shazad Latif), a published author struggling to write a new book. When their first child, Matilda (Hiba Ahmed), gets hired to act in a movie, Ben finds escorting his daughter to the set the perfect excuse not to write. The fact that the film stars a glamorous actress, Alicia (Matilda Lutz), who Ben quickly develops feelings for, gives him the perfect excuse to cheat on his wife.
In the feature directorial debut of Sam Yates, Magpie does a great job of making Ben as despicable a husband as you can imagine. You can’t help booing him as the bad guy waiting to cheer Anette when she finally gets enough and fights back. Where it stumbles is not giving Ben a second dimension, something to make us understand why he and Anette are together in the first place. As thin as Ben is on the page, Latif’s performance makes him practically transparent. He starts as a scumbag and only grows scummier as the story movies along.
As the movie star/homewrecker, Lutz is hobbled by the same character shortcomings as Latifl but at least tries to give Alicia some presence on the screen. She does a pretty good job of it, too, considering the most Tom Bateman’s script asks her to do is look smolderingly into the camera.
Ridley’s role is a little meatier, but you can tell she’s having trouble finding any nourishment from it. When Anette has a lunch date job interview, for example, she arrives with the baby in tow because Ben has forgotten or ignored the importance of the appointment for her. The man she meets with is a jerk about the baby and Anette; his words, attitude, and body language dismiss them as unimportant. You can watch Anette’s struggle with the situation play out across Ridley’s face, but it never finds a voice.
A surprise twist at the end of Magpie tries to wrap it all up neatly, with lots of flashbacks to let you reexamine key a-ha moments, but it feels forced like something added last minute because the first cut of the film didn’t make sense. The ending lifts Ridley’s performance, underscoring the meaning behind her actions and inactions up to that point. It’s not enough, however, to save the story.
