Styles is behind some of the film’s fatal flaws, but the blame cannot be placed squarely on his shoulders. This same goes for Marion’s plight: it would be far easier for us to understand why she waits some forty years - despite learning about the men’s relationship early on - to ask herself why she’s stayed with Tom, if we sensed that she loved him at all. The reason, of course, is that he is in love with him, but while Dawson and Styles are refreshingly game during the couple’s beautiful sex scenes, the film fails to conjure the emotional breadth of their romance.

His odd delivery, which sees him elongating words in order to emphasise them, and his indescribably odd vocal pitch, lend the overall film a hallucinatory feeling and made the audience at the London Film Festival’s press & industry screening erupt into laughter on more than one occasion.ĭavid Dawson is most convincing as museum curator Patrick, a gay man who knows who he is and what he likes, though why he would let the inept Tom embroil him in a marriage with Marion is baffling. But it’s all for nothing because Harry Styles, in the title role as Tom, makes it impossible for audiences to take the story seriously. Emma Corrin does a salutary job as young Marion, torn between complex feelings of anger, disgust and heartbreak when she realises what her husband has been up to. Grandage’s film is far too conventional and bourgeois to convey such strong and difficult emotions, and the taboo around homosexuality at that time comes across as a ridiculous film trope rather than anything to do with reality. Unlike unrequited love, or the natural way in which two people might grow apart, his heartbreaks are caused by an unnatural external force, a cruel law that shouldn’t exist. One crucial aspect of Forster’s novel is that, while it follows several years of a closeted man’s life, it never slides into bland melancholia or wistful nostalgia: his protagonist’s regrets are open wounds which never heal. Perhaps the utter banality of Grandage’s film would be easier to ignore if Forster himself hadn’t written so beautifully about his own experience as a closeted gay man in 1950s Britain. Written by Bethan Roberts, the novel on which Michael Grandage’s My Policeman is based, is inspired by Forster’s real-life romance with a married policeman as depicted in both the novel and the film, this policeman’s wife later became a live-in nurse for Forster.

My policeman book online