The Ploughman's Lunch (1983) User Reviews (9)

Flawed but fascinating

[ian_harris · 7/10 · 8 May 2003]

I am a huge fan of Richard Eyre's work on stage and think he did a masterful job running the National Theatre for all those years. However, both the movies he has directed that I have seen (this one and Iris) are flawed. I think his style of directing might not suit film. There are several passages of the film that neither progress argument, nor develop characters nor set atmosphere effectively.

I am also a big fan of Ian McEwan's writing. This story is full of interesting material. Some of it could come across better - especially the double crossing in the various love interests and the echo of the Suez crisis therein. This might come down to the screenplay or perhaps the directing again.

But stick with it.

The scene in the pub during which Frank Finlay explains to Jonathan Pryce the origins of the ploughman's lunch is superb. The ghastly hermetically sealed cheese chunks on their plates providing a visual to Finlay's words.

We live in a society where we constantly reinvent the past in our attempts to shape the future as we want it. This is a key lesson in the film on all its many levels - the several love interests, Pryce's dereliction of family duty, the Falklands War and the Suez Crisis.

This is a fascinating piece. All the characters are ghastly, especially Jonathan Pryce's well-crafted central character. The standard of acting is consistently high. Despite the flaws, it is well worth seeing.

A Dog's Dinner rather than a Ploughman's Lunch

[goldgreen · 6/10 · 21 September 2018]

Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining. I saw it on release and again for the second time this week and the lasting impression is a dog's dinner of ideas. At the centre there is a doomed romance, overlaid with a smorgasbord of messages inter-weaved in the script. I shall attempt to list these message here. a) The long term decline of Britain's importance in the world, b) the folly of the Suez expedition and a sort of oblique parallel with the Falklands War which doesn't work - Suez was a disaster, the Falklands campaign successful, c) the emotional toughness/nastiness of the Thatcher government, d) the Greenham Common anti-nuclear encampment (not sure what this is doing in the film), e) the lies sold by advertising, f) the bias inherent in the way we rewrite history, g) the English class system, h) the emotional coldness of journalists. Phew! Added on to this, we have the conundrum of our hard to like hero James Penfield who wants love, but does not show it to those who love him. Crucially, he is foolishly chasing a snooty, upper (ruling) class girl whose own frivolous behaviour seems to be a comment on Britain's decline. The real shame is that there are some fantastic parts to the film. Rosemary Harris is just perfect as the love seeking historian. And, then there is the cinema magic of filming the denouement to the central romance within the real-life setting of the Conservative Party Conference. With a few changes this film could have been up there with Performance and Brief Encounter, instead of an obscure curio of British cinema.

Perhaps a bit too talkie politically, but frequently fascinating.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 21 February 2023]

This will be more of interest to British history majors, particularly those interested in the Margaret Thatcher days is prime minister, this surrounding the Falklands War and how the press dealt with it. It's a very gentle story, even considering the subject matter, and with a cast of actors such as Jonathan Pryce, Tim Curry and Rosemary Harris (all actors I have seen on stage), and as political as it is, it focuses so much on character development and the recital of data that it tends to slow down to a halt at times. Yet it is beautifully filmed, and all three give sensational performances. But I'll never forget the site of a little boy reciting all the names of the Kings of England over the years, and corrected that he left out the Cromwells, commenting, they don't count.

I have to give Harris the nod for being the most memorable of the three actors, because she can just give a look and say so much more without speaking a word. But the script itself really doesn't take the film anywhere into the important places it should have gone, and the movie is completely void of any type of action outside a few incidents where Pryce finds his toes being stepped on, keeping him destracted rather than in order to do his job. Surprisingly, what starts off as a dull recitation of facts begins to pick up as I'm tempted to pull away from it, and it makes me wonder if this would have been better as a TV movie rather than going on to the big screen where it was surely not to get much attention. It's obvious that the agenda was very anti-Thatcher (as it seems that the British film industry was), but it certainly could have presented its facts and thoughts in a more entertaining way rather than the dry structure much in need of life giving moisture.

Something chilling this way comes

[mwesley-200-580249 · 10/10 · 27 November 2014]

Totally agree - have been a huge fan of this film since I saw it on Channel 4 in the mid 80's and while it's been many years since I've seen it it lingers in the mind like a cold stain,with the reprehensible character that Jonathan Pryce plays remaining one of the most mesmerising cold and self-serving people ever committed to film - the final shot,without giving it away,is breathtakingly harsh and sums up his persona in one callous masterstroke.

It is also beautifully crafted/shot and scored,with a dark and entrancing mood maintained throughout. I've literally only just found out today it was released on DVD in the UK a couple of years ago so have ordered a copy.

Extraordinary stuff and one of the great movies of the 1980's. Mike Wesley

Slow, but if you stay with it, it is very fascinating

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 16 April 2011]

The Ploughman's Lunch is a very interesting movie. It is rather slow sometimes, and some of the lost interest ideas could have been a little better developed. But if you do stay with it, it is a fine movie. The movie is very well made, with stylish camera shots without being too fancy and fine location shooting. The direction is very skilled while never flashy, the story is compelling with a superbly staged and written scene in the pub between Jonathan Pryce and Frank Finlay and the writing is superb. The characters are even more fascinating, especially Pryce's. Ghastly but deliberately so. The acting especially from Pryce and Rosemary Harris is uniformly excellent. Overall, a fine and interesting film, that is worth sticking with even with the pace. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Underrated little gem of the 80s

[bjacob · 9/10 · 25 December 2017]

Spectacular balancing act between fact and fiction, public and private, greedy, ambitious Thatcherites and vacuous upper class specimen of the gauche caviar. The "Ploughman's lunch" is extremely tightly narrated and manages to make the spectator interested in the sorts of a bunch of not really likeable characters and their struggles for love, sex and power. This is "Wall Street" in European and ultra-minor key version and a formidable depiction of the Eighties and their political and social contradictions.

Hope I haven't made it sound boring, because it isn't -- it's wryly, dryly funny, without even so much of a wink to the spectator, and dissects his protagonists with surgical precision.

Coldly, faultlessly observed portrait of various very unpleasant bourgeois Thatcher-dominated Brits, involved in the life of the bleak central character, a morally bankrupt journalist.

[BOUF · 16 March 2000]

This is a very cold, well observed multi-layered portrait of a bunch of vile people, all scrambling up and down the greasy pole in the politically bleak bourgeois homeland of Thatcher's Britain at the time of its Falklands War obsession. The central character, an empty, ambitious, morally bankrupt journalist (Jonathan Pryce) is impossible to like or even dislike - just like the film itself. It's like a doctor's accurate diagnosis: you may need to know, but you don't necessarily want to. The photography is beautiful.

Why Isn't Rosemary Harris made a Dame yet?

[Sylviastel · 8/10 · 17 February 2007]

That's my question! Rosemary Harris who has appeared on stage, films, and television with great respect, accolades and honors still hasn't received Damehood yet like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and yet she is as good and even sometimes better than her contemporary British counterparts. It's one of the reasons I picked up this little film at the drugstore for five dollars. Jonathan Pryce still hasn't been honored yet but I'm sure he will. I could Rosemary Harris in anything. I'm glad that people are recognizing her more since she played the Aunt in Superman but still it's not enough. Rosemary Harris plays Ann, a mature older woman, who has her sights set on Pryce's James Penfield, a troubled journalist. The film is set in the 1980s during the peak of Margaret Thatcher's term as the country's prime minister. I was pleased to see parts of London like Brixton, Brighton, and Norfolk actually be used as locations rather than just saying they were there. The plot is thin but I think Rosemary's BAFTA nominated performance makes up for it anyway. She's still heartbreaking and brilliant.

A much under-appreciated temperature-taking of Britain at a very specific time

[philosopherjack · 12 March 2021]

Richard Eyre's The Ploughman's Lunch, written by Ian McEwan, is a much under-appreciated temperature-taking of Britain at a very specific time - the early years of Thatcherism marking an end to some long-established certainties, but the shape of their replacements not yet clear, national self-examination temporarily largely suspended under the patriotic boost of the Falklands war. Jonathan Pryce's James Penfield, a BBC radio news producer, should perhaps in theory be perfectly placed to analyze and draw on the national evolution, but is strangely stunted, unable to see his job as much more than a matter of making the hourly bulletins smoothly fill the allotted time; he fixes on an idea of building his reputation by writing a book on the 1956 Suez crisis, his views on which appear much more superficial than those of the historians he interviews. The challenges of navigating class structures run throughout the film - Penfield has absorbed an elitist mindset to the extent that he can laugh out loud at the pointless questions raised by the audience at a poetry reading, but then finds himself on the other end when trying to keep up at a privilege-soaked (albeit that some of the attendees profess themselves to be fervent socialists) dinner party. His evolution is such that he's effectively no longer capable of communicating with his unpretentious working-class parents, but he lacks the unquestioning facility of those who were born into it (his treatment at the hands of the woman he imagines he's in love with is often excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch). The title refers to the contention that the term "ploughman's lunch," supposedly a reference to a traditionally rustic meal built around bread and cheese, was actually a marketing construct from the 1960's, and as such evokes the uncertain nature of our understanding of social and cultural change and its impact on the present, as well as the way in which capitalist interests are often pulling the strings. The film's primary virtues may be literary and intellectual rather than visceral and cinematic, but it's endlessly and subtly fascinating as such.