When a film or TV show explores the fine line between musical fandom and celebrity worship, I’m surely paying attention. Then to learn that the fictional folk-rock star in Focus Features full-length “The Ballad of Wallis Island” — a Brit called Herb McGwyer played by Tom Basden — sings real, original songs written and performed by Basden, OK, that’s extra compelling. Now add Carey Mulligan as Nell Mortimer, McGwyer’s ex-lover and former musical collaborator, put them on a remote island for a private concert to an audience of one, the sweet but socially oblivious double lottery winner Charles Heath played by Tim Key. Magic.
Sketch comedian pals Basden and Key first conceptualized the relationship between the McGwyer and Heath characters, two strangers, in a celebrated 25-minute short called “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island,” which premiered to much acclaim at film festivals in 2007. In the years since, Key said, they’ve kept coming back around to the hope that this tale might be fleshed out, knocking around ideas over pints on more than one occasion and agreeing, “We must do that!” One such idea, an addition to the original story that unlocked a new intensity, was Mulligan’s Mortimer character, which Basden said gives viewers “access to the past.” Adding a romantic and creative history between McGwyer Mortimer provides a flip through the three leads’ “backstories and all of the emotions that really explain why these people are the way they are now.”
COVID-19’s forced halt to other jobs gave Key and Basden the time and impetus to focus on “Wallis Island” again. Blessedly, the short film’s director, James Griffiths — the “third parent” to the baby that is this story — had moved back from LA to the UK in time to take on this full-length film, allowing for continuity in the trio’s collaboration. Griffiths scouted locations for weeks and ultimately found a remote stretch of coastline in southwest Wales to serve as the fictional Wallis Island. This setting for the entire runtime of the film, authentic with the British Isles’ unpredictable weather, is almost its own character and adds such drama and beauty to an already tender story.
What we see of Wallis Island includes just the unspoiled coast and the sprawling yet unfussy manor Heath has lived in solo since the death of his wife, with only a little shop and a payphone booth down the way. The McGwyer character is less than charmed by the conditions of the place he’s to play a private show for his wealthy superfan Heath, who Key describes as someone “fairly annoying…who doesn’t have an OFF button.” Impolite grumpiness gives way to shock upon the arrival of Mortimer, also invited by Heath but unbeknownst to McGwyer when he committed to the lucrative, can’t-say-no gig.
I love the way these characters are introduced and then take shape without actual flashback scenes, but through indications of their former lives in the voiced memories, vinyl records and tangible music memorabilia of Heath. In his solitary home and by his almost obsessive recollection in the film, we get relics of the olden days when McGwyer Mortimer were a beloved duo, before their romantic partnership ended and thus did the music. Before McGwyer went mainstream, more commercial, as a solo artist far less interesting to the nostalgic Heath. “I don’t want his most famous songs,” said Key about his character’s preferences from McGwyer’s catalog, “I just want the songs he was playing when I used to go there with my wife.” The sentimentality evoked by music is palpable and highly relatable.
Basden thinks it’s this, the alluding to past, that gives the film its heart and its heft. “It’s what makes the film quite moving,” he said, “is that the characters are filled with regret and are looking back at happier times, more innocent times of their life, and they’re having to sort of work out how the present fits in with that.”
This movie is a comedy that offers a subtle commentary on artistic integrity but also the complex dynamics among musical collaborators, and between artists and their fans. Through interactions on the island over a few days, McGwyer reckons with himself. And Heath gets, while maybe not exactly what he thought he wanted and was paying for, a portal to both the past and a potential future.
“The Ballad of Wallis Island” is now showing at Belcourt Theater, where Basden and Key did a special early screening and Q&A in late March. On April 12, additional theaters across Middle Tennessee and all of the U.S. will show the film. Basden and Mulligan’s songs can be heard on the official motion picture soundtrack available for purchase and on streaming services like Apple Music.
